


A S C E N S I O N

by aleksandr_starshow



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater, The Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: :-), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Slow Burn, Zombie Apocalypse, and please be sure to check out the notes in future chapters for references and warnings, anyway The Plot Thickens, chapter 4 tags include premonitions!, honestly this has been one of my outlets for dealing with the pandemic, i promise that it won't take till the end of the story to realise this is actually an epic romance, i'm surprised i actually wrote a plot, just within a zombie apocalyptic setting, lindenmere doing creepy things, lots of premonitions, oh and the character death probably isn't what you think it is, robobee doing creepy things, surreal supernatural creepfest, tags will be updated as each chapter is uploaded, the rain doing creepy things, there's zombie gore in this too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:13:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 43,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29507436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aleksandr_starshow/pseuds/aleksandr_starshow
Summary: Chaos is building as the world falls more and more apart under the lies, hate, and destruction of humanity. Power outages race across the globe. Ley lines are zapped of energy. The death toll skyrockets. Then there are the low-hanging clouds and the groaning that comes from behind them and the rain that follows, a rain that says 'this is my home now.' As the planet changes before them, as fauna and flora warp into alien things both grotesquely horrific and hauntingly beautiful, and with Gansey missing in action, Adam must figure out his relationship with a Lindenmere in pain, and Ronan must discover exactly what it means to be the Greywaren. With the help of 300 Fox Way and other familiar faces, Gansey, Adam, and Ronan must find each other and figure out a way to defeat a world created to destroy them before they lose themselves along the way.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Adam Parrish, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 13
Kudos: 13





	1. p r e l u d e

__

_I will show you fear in a handful of dust._

_-T.S. Eliot_

## i. p r e l u d e 

They were dark ghosts in the night. 

She came to a sudden stop so that he almost plowed right into her. They were both trembling. They were both covered in blood splatters, sweat, and saliva. He didn’t ask why she’d stopped. He simply followed her gaze. Helicopters buzzed overhead. It took all of a few seconds but it felt like hours - packages being dropped from great heights onto the frenzied city below, the city erupting into balls of flame, the sound of a million voices crying out as they burned. 

The last part he may have imagined. 

Maybe. 

They stood like that for a while, grief rooting itself within their bones, and then, in unison, they turned and fled into the woods. 

_☣_


	2. n a s c e n c e

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was a long time coming! I’ve been mulling over writing a zombie fic for years! Actually, I’m not sure what to call this. Are there zombies? Yes. Are there other creepy, crazy, crawly things? Yes. Are there epic moments involving human flight and three moons and reanimated helicopters? Also yes! 
> 
> This story is strange and convoluted and it’s been a wonderful outlet during these trying times. Be warned, however - there is character death (or several), there are mentions of politics, there are dubious portrayals of government shutdowns and military actions and a whole bunch of wild stuff. And there’s something about boats. And lighthouses. Because why not, right?
> 
> I also bumped up the series timeline. So, this story does take place in 2020, and it's just at the end of Adam's first year at Harvard University (I think that's as good a milestone as any!). There are elements of Call Down the Hawk in this but they're not canon-compliant. 
> 
> Please keep in mind this is a very heavily centered Ronan/Adam/Gansey fic, and though I tried to include the other characters as much as needed and tried to give these characters agency, my focus is on these three men in particular and their journeys with dealing with grief, depression, and an environment created to destroy them - as well as how they rely on one another mentally, emotionally, physically. It’s the end of the world, folks! Buckle up! 
> 
> I’d also like to thank @audikatia for her undying patience and for the thousands of late night talks dissecting characters, analysing details from the books, tossing ideas back and forth, and playing with the intrinsic question: what if? Thank you for creating the wonderful cover and for venturing into a dozen fantastical worlds with me, for being a super understanding editor and friend. All errors henceforth are my own.

_Our dries voices, when  
We whisper together  
Are quiet and meaningless  
As wind in dry grass _

_-T.S. Eliot_

## ii. n a s c e n c e

**Thayer** [12:53:03 PM]

Adam’s fists were bloodied as he pounded against the metal. There was little time for logic because he couldn’t breathe. He gulped in water, choked, spat it out, died, woke up, gulped in water, choked, spat it out, died—

His thoughts were a jumble—

Icy water shoved its way down his throat, raced down his esophagus, flooded his lungs and stomach and—

His world went black—

Couldn’t breathe—

He was dead. 

He was alive. 

There was darkness and light at the same time; the world was black but it was also white and filled with little glowing orbs, and then—

He was on a beach, drinking tequila, laughing about some stock market joke Gansey made. _No_ , he was facedown in the sand, half-naked, exposed skin stinging from the sun. When he blinked his eyes open, there was a green flower bud right there, in front of him, half wedged into the sand. It was the only thing living while he was dead. 

The bud shook. 

Adam opened his eyes. 

It shook some more. 

Adam opened his eyes. 

It began to float; veins illuminated by some glowing mass within. His hands ached. He heard Gansey’s laugh; a relief, though a temporary one, because Gansey hadn’t been heard from in nearly three weeks. Adam held out his hand and, to the tune of Gansey’s laughter, the bud landed upon his palm and grew larger. 

Adam opened his mouth to swallow it. To drink from it. To take all that life within him. 

He was at the Barns, his eyes sore from the change in light, his whole body reeling from being thrust between worlds, between the living and the dead. He was inside one of the larger barns, amidst a herd of sleeping cattle. Somewhere, a cow was floating through the air. Ronan was there with that expression on his face; the one he always wore after they’d had sex; not the blissful, post-coital expression, but the caring, kind one, the one Ronan saved for Adam, the tender, loving gaze and this gaze became that of a dog. No, a cat. No, a raven. 

They were in one of the barns, shuffled between a herd of sleeping cattle; Ronan’s face was reverent. A violin played the most lovely tune. Ronan’s hands were in his. A wasp emerged from between them and Gansey’s laugh bubbled out of it. It buzzed and buzzed and flinched and vibrated and began to grow larger and its wings morphed into a translucent lime-green lace and its body liquified and filled the newly created cocoon. It floated inside Ronan and burst within him, and glowing lights emanated from his figure like little fireflies on a wonderfully summer night. 

He was choking again, something clawing at his face, the pain excruciating.

_RONAN, SAVE ME!!_

Adam died on that summer night. 

And became something else.

He was awake before he could process it. 

His phone was in his hands before he could process it. 

There was shouting outside. Adam was calling Ronan. He was encased in a cold sweat. It was one in the afternoon according to his cell phone, which meant he missed Rau and Hudson. But it was also Saturday, which meant he hadn’t missed much of anything except a study group at Lowell and an economics assembly at Agreeda and a church lunch at Divinity. Gillian had left five hundred texts and Eliot had called no less than nine times. There was a message from Blue letting him know that Gansey was still MIA. But Adam ignored all of this, the phone pressed against his hearing ear, waiting, waiting with baited breath, for Ronan to pick up. _Why was Thayer so damn cold_ , it was early afternoon, the sun was high in the sky. News blared from his dormmate's open laptop. Adam frowned at it. 

_Please, please, please_

“If you don’t get to the part where you tell me exactly where you want to stick your fingers, I’m gonna hang up.”

“I thought you hated sex talk over the phone,” Adam replied patiently, his voice astoundingly even, though inside, he was bursting with _im_ patience and fervor, though he could still feel the claws tearing at his flesh, though he could feel his lungs burning from having drowned a thousand times--

Of _course_ he’d rather be discussing with his boyfriend exactly how he wanted to have him. Right then. Right there. 

“I’m having a brief change of heart. Very brief.” 

Adam was already feeling calm seep through him, fighting back the panic and the pain. 

“Well, good, make it more brief because I’m not calling to discuss our sex life. I’m calling because I had a nightmare.” 

Ronan didn’t make a snarky comment to _that_ , which was a sign that Adam’s meaning had been made evident. Adam wouldn’t call over a nightmare. He’d call over a _nightmare_ and that was a rather important distinction when you dealt with boys who communed with ethereal forests. In the background, Ronan could just make out the news reporting upon the controversy surrounding President Trump’s possible re-election and his use of white supremacists and loyalists to retain power. 

Adam imagined he could hear Ronan pacing, imagined he could see Ronan anxiously and angrily biting his thumb, biting his wristbands. Outside Thayer, the shouts continued. Adam felt a migraine burgeon at the base of his skull and work its way towards his eyes. He hadn’t recalled any sort of student activity outside Thayer planned for that very Saturday morning, but who knew, he was so entrenched in his studies and extracurriculars, it was completely likely he’d missed something. 

Adam explained as much of the nightmare as he could put into words, glossing past the parts that caused him panic attacks and phantom agony. Sure, it was still gruesome. Adam was just mentioning the wasp rising out from between Ronan’s prayer-clasped hands when the line became quiet. Adam took the phone away from his ear; the screen was black. He clicked a button. Nothing. It was dead. Dead like he’d been earlier. Adam frowned; he was sure that his phone had been plugged into the charger when he’d awoken and that the battery had been full. 

More shouting came from outside accompanied by loud crunching sounds. People screamed. 

Adam rushed to his dorm room window, ramming his hip on his desk as he looked out through the paned glass. _What the hell?_

Outside in the Old Yard were two tanks. Not statues of tanks. Not _retired_ tanks from past wars. Actual, fully functional tanks. And these tanks, flanked by soldiers in camo, carrying what were probably M40s, were barrelling down upon students. They weren’t moving particularly fast but—

P-P-P-P-P-P-PUHHH! P-P-P-P-P-P-PUHH!

Adam saw blood spray and watched in horror as several students went down. In the distance, just between the trees, he could see smoke. 

This wasn’t happening

He backed away from the window—

This was just another part of his nightmare—

He was going to die this summer. 

◈ ◈ ◈

**The Barns** [1:01:40 PM]

Almost nothing Adam said truly surprised Ronan. It wasn’t just the fact that his boyfriend was calling him to discuss a nightmare, but rather that Ronan had felt something, too - he dreamt frequently and wandered along Lindenmere’s existential, surrealistic conundrum of an environment and though he’d been careful not to request many things that sapped the ley line, he _had_ noticed that, as vibrant and lively Lindenmere often was, it was becoming _less_ . This started recently, only a few months prior. It had been a mild concern. Lindenmere hadn’t expressed any pain or fear and Ronan, knowing that he was only the king of a small corner of an entire realm between realms, figured maybe it was time to diminish his requests. Instead of dreaming up entire center pivot irrigation systems, he allowed himself to go into town and buy them himself and, instead, he’d only ask Lindenmere for more energy and hydro-efficient end guns and sprinklers. Instead of asking Lindenmere for the easy, big solutions, Ronan carried with him a tiny composition notebook and a pencil stub that he used to do all the maths he needed to ensure the best irrigation practises per crop. Instead of dreaming up feed that was 100% nutrient rich and tailored specifically for his cattle, he bought legumes and silage and grass and dreamt up containers of powders that he could sprinkle into the feed to ensure a more efficient nutrient rich diet. But the overall weakening of Lindenmere had some very coincidental timing with the pandemic and Gansey had once stated that he didn’t believe in coincidences. Ronan hated that he could hear Gansey’s voice in his head just then when his best friend had been unreachable for weeks but truths were _truths._

So, each day, Ronan’s requests from Lindenmere became smaller and smaller. And each day, Lindenmere sang to him but became quieter and quieter. The ley line thrummed along with it less and less. 

Ronan had feared the day when the ley line would stop all together, when Lindenmere would simply exist as a forest instead of an imaginarium of hopes, dreams, and desires. 

Adam speaking of nightmares as though they were premonitions only seemed fitting to Ronan in lieu of everything else. It was a harbinger he had long predicted. And just then, he supposed Adam was coming to the conclusion, to the part that would signal to Ronan what he needed to do, what Adam would need help with, when the news, which had been discussing an increase in lockdowns as the pandemic-induced deaths skyrocketed around the globe, went silent.

Ronan paused in mid-pace, and eyed the dream glock on the kitchen counter. Niall had left the Barns stocked with various guns but Ronan had long since come into his own style. 

“Adam?”

No answer. The room felt dimmer and too quiet. 

“ _Parrish_?” 

Ronan looked at his phone - absolutely no signal. _Absurd_. He’d forcibly dreamt the phone so it would work at the Barns in spite of all the crazy dream magic that caused most technology to go haywire. 

“Fucking hell.” 

He knew it was pointless but he tried dialing Adam again. 

Nothing. 

He tried dialing Gansey, which he knew was futile. He snarled and tried Declan. Matthew, who always answered. 

Nothing. 

He let his phone clatter to the countertop. Leaned forward and gripped the edges. 

Too quiet. 

Was it just his imagination or were the edges of his vision turning into a vignette?

Heart thumping, Ronan turned around to face the rest of the kitchen, to peer into what he could see of the living room. No, lights had definitely gone out. Not all of them. The Barns had been a living source of solace as well as a prison for Ronan; a pretty cage, one he knew intimately. When he walked across its property, he knew that all things made were living even if some were deep in slumber, even if some were incomprehensible. Now, for the first time, the Barns existed in a way that made sense - the kind of sense that would appeal to anyone, and this was _not_ how the Barns normally operated. He felt watched and alone at the same time, like all the usual watchers he’d made peace with had vanished to be replaced with hostile gazes. The gentle, imperceptible hum of liveliness that only someone like Ronan could detect was gone.

The Barns suddenly existed in the real world, in real ways - reality being defined by textbook sciences and not the inexplicable magic to which Ronan and his friends had become accustomed. 

Which was impossible. 

Ronan whirled around and slammed down the handle of the toaster - the one that required no electricity to function. 

It did not work. 

It not only did not work, it lay there like a dead thing, which was something one would never think to apply to an inanimate object. 

Everything was dead. 

“Chainsaw?” he called, his voice flat as though the very air refused to carry it. “ _Opal_?”

No response. 

He replayed Adam’s nightmare in his head. 

Adam Parrish, who didn’t often call about nightmares.  
  
Gansey’s disappearance.  
  
The death of dreamt objects while their dreamer gazed upon them. 

Fear was something Ronan often refused to acknowledge so whatever fear-induced adrenaline began pumping through his veins quickly melted into anger. Anger was something Ronan understood. 

He yanked open the fridge, took out a slice of old pizza and shoved it in his mouth. Grabbing the glock from the counter, Ronan turned and strode across the kitchen, through the living room to the front door. And as he did, the hum of life returned. Chainsaw came careening into the kitchen and landed haphazardly on Ronan’s shoulders, but he didn’t even wince when her claws dug in particularly deep. A minute or so later, Opal peered around the corner. 

“Don’t leave the house,” he told her sternly. He shoved the glock into his jeans where it seemed to hum against his waistband. 

Ronan glanced around - acknowledging every dream object, suddenly alive, suddenly warm, suddenly welcoming. The Barns shifted back across the border of textbook reality to other worldly magic. He couldn’t leave the state with the most recent lockdowns, but he _could_ consult a group of psychics. With a curse, he snatched his keys and a dream-mask off a coffee table and headed out to his BMW. Outside, the very air threatened to choke him. In the distance, he heard howling and couldn’t remember if wolf packs actually existed in this part of Virginia or not. Chainsaw hopped onto the passenger seat and Ronan reached into the glove compartment for saltines. He laid some on the seat for her and then pulled away from the farmhouse. 

As he drove into Henrietta, the darkness within darkness returned. 

  
  
  


◈ ◈ ◈

**300 Fox Way** [1:011:07 PM]

For the second time that day, the eighth time that week, the sky groaned. Blue, Maura, Calla, Orla, and Jimi all stopped in unison to glance uneasily upward, various stages of interpretation allowing them to see through the ceiling and into the heavens. 

“The belly of the beast,” Jimi said. 

“A very, very _hungry_ beast,” amended Maura. 

“It shall feed, it shall feed, it shall feeeeed!” sang Gwenllian as she came flying down the stairs, her eyes wide, her curly-wavy-shaggy auburn hair filled with Jimi’s combs and Blue’s hairpins and something that looked oddly like a mourning veil put on the wrong way. Calla, Jimi, and Maura all exchanged a glance, the heads of the newly-minted three-head dog that they were. 

“It’s too soon,” said Calla. 

“I’m giving it four seconds.” Orla. 

“Four...three…” Maura counted, holding up fingers. When the last one went down, the lights went out. She sighed. “I think I should check on our neighbours. Mrs. Warzniak doesn’t do too well in the dark.” _And it was unnaturally dark outside_ came her unvoiced thoughts, hanging there in the middle of the room for everyone to see and feel. _Especially for early afternoon_. 

“I’ll go with you,” Calla said. 

“Me, too,” chimed in Blue, closing her laptop with a _snap_! Gansey still wasn’t returning her phone calls. The last time they’d spoken was almost three weeks ago when he’d called her in a seeming hurry and informed her that he and his family were being subjected to a two week quarantine. It had been a very ominous call. 

“ _No_.” A finger was aimed at Blue, and Maura, who was normally stoic and sensible, looked momentarily stricken. Blue recoiled more in surprise than discontent. The number of times her mother had snapped at her, Blue could count on one hand. Well, now, maybe two. An apology flitted over Maura’s face. 

“Just stay inside, for now, please,” Maura said, as she gathered up a jacket (it wasn’t raining), a flashlight (that made sense), a pack of candles and lighters (obvious, really) and a baseball bat (for what, Blue couldn’t ascertain). Calla grabbed one of the samurai swords that hung on the wall (dramatic) and two face masks for herself and Maura (just in case). The moment Maura and Calla were out the door, Blue gave Orla a pointed look, moved her laptop to the pile of clothes beside her on the couch, and rushed to the front door. Glancing out the window to make sure Maura and Calla had their backs turned as they walked down the street, Blue opened the door and stepped onto the porch. She was a curious but sensible creature so her curiosity led her to the porch to crane her neck around and survey the atmosphere of the neighbourhood while her sensibility warned her to stay on the porch or, at the very least, on the 300 Fox Way property. Orla came up beside her and made a _hmph_ sound. 

“What do you think?” Blue asked, mildly annoyed at the anxiety-induced edge to her voice. 

Orla shrugged. “We’re in for a rough night.” 

“Bundle up tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite!” Gwenllian cooed from behind them. She was standing in the doorway, peering out like a massive bat-owl-thing that hadn’t seen daylight in centuries, which wasn’t too far off an assessment of Gwenllian anyway. 

Blue, dissatisfied with equivocality, persisted: “Why do you think she wouldn’t let me come?”

After cracking her knuckles like she was gearing up for a fight, Orla folded her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow at her. “I figured you’d know that answer. You amplify things.”

“But this isn’t a psychic phenomenon; it’s just a storm…”

But as Blue looked out across the short lawn and down the street at people standing outside their houses, some of them gazing upward, she realised that she wasn’t entirely correct. There was something uncanny about the outdoors but Blue couldn’t place it; it was like a whisper in the corner of her mind, and she suspected, but hoped she was wrong, that ghosts would be just around the corner. And with Gansey missing… 

_He’s not missing. He just doesn’t have signal,_ she thought to herself furiously. It was what she’d been telling herself over and over. She, Adam, Ronan, and Henry had all tried to contact Gansey and his family and to no avail. Declan had even, begrudgingly, looked into it using his connections but the only thing he could say was that several politician families had left town, sometimes with little notice. The death toll was terrifying and Declan had admitted that things were definitely falling apart in D.C. though it was still largely controversial to speak about politicians being ushered to safety while the general public was told to stay home under martial law. Still, Declan had reasoned and Blue hadn’t been sure if he was lying or not, if Gansey and his family were in quarantine, they were probably safer _there_ than in the public. “Why aren’t _you_ there then?” she’d demanded but Declan hadn’t bothered to answer her because Blue knew the truth. _Matthew_. Matthew couldn’t risk a doctor’s assessment. Declan said he’d let her know if he heard anything and the call ended. That had been nearly a week ago. 

_He’s not missing. He’s safe… he’s safe… he’s safe…_

There were ghosts lurking just out of sight, Blue could _feel_ it. 

It was somehow all connected. 

Orla was looking at her. “I know you know.”

Blue didn’t know _what_ she knew. As she stepped to the edge of the property, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, her skin prickling in spite of the humid air.

At first glance, 300 Fox Way was a decent looking house on a decent looking street. It was powder-blue, had a lovely wrap around porch and a passable paint job. Made up of all the angular intricacies that came with Victorian, and in this case, faux-Victorian, houses, it was a study in hidden stories. The house had been in disrepair when Maura, Persephone and Calla had put the down payment on it almost twenty years prior. The foundation had needed some work, (and to be fair, still had places that made Blue uneasy), the yard had been unkempt and infested with things even Blue could not befriend, the railing on the porch had rotted away, some of the windows were old and needed replacing, the heater had to be replaced, and the walls still sometimes sported the aged, stained wallpaper of previous owners. The backyard was a jungle of neglect that most people didn’t care to make time for. Maura, Persephone, and Calla mortgaged the house at a decent price, initially, because 1) stories told of a vicious murder of the previous owner’s son in said house and Maura had promised the unruly spirits wouldn’t be a problem, 2) Persephone was able to give the real estate three warnings about her life that all came to pass within a week of their first meeting and 3) Calla was able to predict the death of the real estate agent’s cat down to the exact minute and cause. Henriettans were hardly any different than other small towners; they often turned their nose up at the supernatural while secretly being highly superstitious. The real estate agent had been from Buena Vista (pronounced _Boo-na_ Vista, by the locals), a good two hour drive away, and even _she_ would not be unwise and take chances lest these three young, hippie women put her under a spell. It was also completely possible she’d found Calla attractive but that was neither here nor there. 

So Maura, Persephone and Calla bought the house for a fifth of the original cost, which wasn’t too bad as far as nearly-condemned faux-Victorian houses went in small town Virginia, Blue supposed. Soon after, Jimi moved in and contributed her income to the house renovations, which were still many years in the making. It also helped that, over the years, the women found ways to clean up the house without too much cost via harmless bribes and bets that always seemed to work in their favour. 

Blue did not go inside to wait. Orla opened her mouth to suggest, or maybe demand, that Blue come inside, but then seemed to think better of it. She waited outside with Blue. The Fox Way car seemed lonely in the narrow driveway without Blue’s Camaro next to it; her car was back at the Barns because Ronan had been working on dreaming some extensions to it to make it even more worth her while. A dream-car of memories and now, Blue longed to see it, even if only to be reminded of Gansey and Henry and their illustrious, adventure-filled road trip across the country. Her heart panged at the resurgence of memories. 

When Maura and Calla came back, about twenty minutes later (or maybe it had been a couple hours), Maura beckoned for Blue and Orla to go inside. 

“Well?” Blue said. 

“The night is daaarkkk and full of terrors!” Gwenllian intoned. 

“Someone cancel her HBO subscription, _please_ ,” Orla said, rubbing her temples, a joke because they didn’t have an HBO subscription. Jimi was rummaging around in the kitchen cabinets, gathering herbs and Maura’s glass juice bowl. 

“Well, I didn’t have to use my bat.” Maura set the flashlight atop of the shoddily constructed entertainment center. Her mask hung around her neck. “Mrs. Warzniak wasn’t home. I hope she’s okay but I have a feeling she’s not.”

This was said so plainly that Orla frowned. “That’s not exactly _good_.”

Maura exchanged a glance with Calla and then looked over at Orla. “No, it’s not. I’d feel better if our Gray Man were here.”

“You mean, _your_ gray man…” Orla huffed out. She stood, stretched, and said over her shoulder as she went upstairs, “I’m going to make a few calls on all of our behalfs.” 

“Gansey!” Blue exclaimed. She dug out her cell phone - an old iPhone (‘old’ meaning ‘last year’s’) Gansey had given her. Blue, reluctant to take anything from Gansey even while they were dating, had caused a minor uproar over the gift, which, in the end, she knew was unreasonable and overly dramatic. But it had made her feel good (at first) and she liked being indignant about things. Gansey had insisted she keep the phone because he quite liked her, enjoyed her company, and thought the FaceTime capability would be something of merit. Blue had begrudgingly admitted, to herself and no one else, that he’d been right. She clicked on his name for the millionth time that week.

“Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail box of Dick Gansey; I am currently unavailable…”

Frustrated and disappointed, Blue hung up before the voicemail greeting finished. She tried again. Straight to voicemail. _He’s alive_ , she reassured herself some more. Everyone said he was. And, as always, Blue hoped he wasn’t still mad at her for the most recent fight: over his mother’s politics (for the five hundredth time). She didn’t think he was. She’d once asked if he felt they argued too often and Gansey had graciously bowed his head and said, with an easy smile, “Not at all, Jane. It keeps me on my toes. I’d rather you voice how you feel than keep it bottled inside.”

Gansey’s sensibility and respect coupled with their last phone call sent all kinds of emotions through Blue. She wasn’t much of a crier but she’d oftentimes found her chest growing tight and her throat closing up as she fought back burgeoning tears. _He’s alive_. Whether or not he was still mad at her didn’t — shouldn’t — matter. _Just please let him be alive._

Blue dialed Ronan. It also went straight to voicemail - a rather poetically vulgar voicemail that Ronan had set up for friends and acquaintances and people he didn’t like. This, the tone of the voicemail and Ronan not answering, didn’t surprise Blue but she was still concerned regardless. She dialed Henry but only got a busy signal. She frowned. As she dialed Adam, Calla and Maura had set up candles and oil lanterns. Jimi was billowing sage around the room while chanting something under her breath. Gwenllian danced amidst it all, being simultaneously unhelpful and also largely in the way. 

“H— lo— Blue— ay—” came Adam’s voice over a whole bunch of static. Blue yanked the phone from her ear, startled by how loud it was. Orla looked at her in the darkness as she pranced back into the living room and Blue put him on speaker. 

“Adam? Adam? Can you hear me?”

“He— shots ever— move—” His breathing was loud, like he was panting after a run. There was noise in the background that Blue could only pick up between moments of clarity: loud bangs, mostly, shouting, a horn or maybe a siren. “Please— stay—”

The line went dead. Blue stared at the phone. Orla stared at Blue. Maura and Calla had also paused to listen. 

“Was it just me or did he sound—” Blue began. 

“Panicked,” Orla finished, nodding. Adam had sounded terrified. And those loud bangs in the background sounded oddly like fireworks. Or guns. Or the canonfire sometimes heard from the Civil War reenactments that took place in her town. Blue had never been able to tell the difference and Adam wasn’t in Henrietta but Cambridge, Massachusetts. Outside, the sky groaned again and all the women, even Gwenllian this time, all looked upward at the ceiling as though waiting for the house to cave in around them. 

“That’s the third time it’s happened today,” Calla said. Nervousness lined her voice. They all knew that three was a very strong number and could lean heavily towards the bad, the neutral or the good, and it was pretty clear which direction everyone at 300 Fox Way felt this new phenomenon leaned.

“Everyone on our street is without power,” Maura said. “Quite a few of the neighbours are in the street asking for information.” 

Jimi paused with the cleansing to ask: “Did you get any of that information?”

Maura shook her head. “No one knows anything. I don’t feel any surges in the ley lines either.”

“Dreamer-boy’s been keepin’ it low-key,” Orla said, and Blue wondered, briefly and a smidge resentfully, how she knew _that_. 

Maura suddenly reached for the downstairs phone just as the whole house buzzed and the lights flickered on, causing Blue to shield her eyes for a few seconds. Maura dialed rapidly and shoved the phone against her ear. She tapped the bat impatiently against her leg. The Gray Man picked up and Maura held out the phone. Blue unfolded herself from the couch and hit a couple buttons on the phone to put the Gray Man on speaker - honestly, she didn’t know why they didn’t switch to a phone that had its own separate speaker button. 

“Maura? Maura?” came Dean Allen’s voice, lion-like and concerned. 

“We’re all here,” she hurried to reply. “All of us. We’re alive.”

“Good, good. I’m heading your way. Just leaving the house now.” This was all said very fast, but very precisely in the Gray Man’s usual articulate manner. “I believe we should leave _now_. Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities.” Blue had known the Gray Man for long enough to know that this was the closest he ever came to showing real fear and this made Blue very afraid, too. The women of Fox Way knew something or guessed at something that Blue couldn’t but this time, she wasn’t sure she could find it in herself to ask. Adam’s panic reverberated through her mind along with Gansey’s harried “Listen, a lot is going on. My parents were—” before there was a scuffle on his end and the line ended. The groaning of the sky could be heard from Mr. Gray’s end, too. He exchanged _I love yous_ with Maura and the call ended. Outside, the groaning continued evenly. This was the longest it had gone on without stopping. It sounded like a spaceship of immense size, or like a door slowly creaking open, or someone trying to sneak down a hallway and stepping upon a particularly sensitive part of the hardwood floor. Setting the bat against a bookcase, Maura made some signal to Calla and Jimi, who immediately went in different directions to different parts of the house. Calla reluctantly set the samurai swords down. Blue didn’t know what they were doing; she was very, very tense, but being, again, the sensible person that she was, she did not give into panic. 

_Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities_. 

But she could still taste Adam’s panic in her mouth. Adam was in a city. Gansey was in a city. Henry was in a city. 

_He’s alive_. 

Over the next thirty minutes, with the sky’s threats lingering above them, the women of 300 Fox Way went about gathering supplies; they moved steadily but with a sense of urgency. Food, tarot cards, herbs and spices, flashlights and batteries, face masks, knives of varying sizes, a change of clothes (this made Blue’s stomach clench), feminine hygiene products and toiletries, candles, lighters and matches, both space blankets, a mini radio, an equally mini generator, a travel-sized water purifier, first aid kits, duct tape, scissors, a couple crystals, some goddess statues, and Maura’s black glass scrying bowl Jimi had dug out earlier. Small bundles of cash were hastily stuffed to the bottoms of bags, debit and credit cards and passports emptied from the vault. 

“Are we expected to leave the country?”

Calla glanced down at Blue from her place on a ladder - they kept one of the many safes hidden in the back of the top part of an old bookshelf; the shelf it was on sagged beneath its weight but had, luckily, held for the last ten years. “We don’t know.”

“Is this related to the virus?”

Calla sighed. “We think so.”

Blue sucked in a breath. A couple months ago, the government had issued a declaration stating that a virus was on the loose but that it wasn’t anything to worry about. Just wear masks, wash your hands, and stay at least six feet apart from people. This caused a mass outcry as the death toll began to skyrocket. Now it was the end of May, and businesses, schools, and other such places were locked down and people were forced to stay home to quarantine. Supposedly, military-policed checkpoints and quarantine stations had been set up around all state borders and on the outskirts of major cities. Each state had its own way of dealing with the lockdowns, however, and Virginia’s wasn’t exactly top-tier. 300 Fox Way kept to proper procedures - only ventured out when needed to, ordered online as opposed to in person, handed outside things with gloves, wore masks when out and about, and kept apart from strangers as much as possible. They’d lost a significant amount of business, and Maura and Calla were beginning to pull from savings. 

Henrietta hadn’t been hit much; two cases in a week, thirty cases the next week, and then the numbers diminished again, probably due to its isolationist position near Appalachia, the nearest big city was barely twice the size Henrietta in population, which wasn't to say much. Blue, coming to the summer before she was expected to go to college after taking a gap year to travel the country, wasn’t sure what to expect over the next few months but all portents within 300 Fox Way spelled some level of doom. She went back to picking up shifts at Nino’s, which had managed to stay open despite lockdowns, but this time opting to do delivery, which had proved more lucrative since she didn’t have to worry about maintenance and fuel for her dream-Camaro. She also started doing tarot readings online, which proved to be a booming business: people wanted answers about the new virus, about the virus affecting them, about loved ones who’d recently passed. The topics became so depressing and the cards themselves seemed miserable, that Blue could only do a couple hours a week without feeling utterly mentally drained. 

Meanwhile, the media argued about whether this was a virus to take seriously or not, whether or not public policy was doing the best it could for citizens. But no matter what happened, what anyone said, Maura, Jimi, Calla, and Orla would pull out a tarot card and death would be imminent. The next few days, numbers would skyrocket again. St. Mark’s Eve took on a different tone this year. Unemployment reached all-time highs. Nino’s eventually shut down even its pick-up orders and then its delivery as well. Small businesses suffered. It was a subject Blue had argued with Gansey about only for Gansey to agree with her in the end and inform her that he had no say over how his mother and her party handled things. 

_Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities._

The lights flickered just then and only Blue paused to wait to see if they’d go out. The other women went on with what they were doing and then the lights stabilised. Blue, feeling particularly useless, sat down on the floor in front of the television and flipped it on. Static filled the room similar to what she’d heard during Adam’s phone call. Then the screen went blue and then stripes of various clashing shades flashed on. A loud _BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP_ filled the air. 

“Blue—” Orla began but a voice cut across her. 

“Attention; Attention; This is not a test; This is not a—”

The screen went blank. Then blue again. But the stripes, the beeping, and the voice did not reappear. 

Instead, a bright light flashed across the window indicative of a car pulling into their driveway. 

“Mr. Gray—” Blue said in a breathless rush, jumping to her feet and dashing to the door. A car door slammed, and heavy, hurried footsteps could be heard on the rickety pathway leading to the front of the house. A fist raised to knock, Blue opened the door and almost got a knuckle to the face. Ronan stood there, paler than usual, dragging his own strange, silvery mask down to his neck. On his shoulder, Chainsaw sat rather obediently. 

“You guys are still alive,” he said, sounding almost as breathless as Blue. 

She backed up to let him in. 

“Have you heard from Parrish? Gansey?”

Blue shook her head. “Gansey’s phone went to voicemail, like always.” She tried not to sound bitter at this. “Yours did, too, but Adam picked up—”

Ronan flicked a couple fingers in a quick greeting to the women who nodded his way. Gwenllian flashed her teeth at him. “Wait, you said my phone did? I can’t always receive calls at the Barns because of the dream shit but even when I left, the signal was shot. My phone’s dead now.”

“Like battery—”

“Yeah, which is bullshit. It was good earlier; fully charged and everything. Was turning on earlier. Now it won’t even turn on and I forgot to replace the car charger. You got a hold of Parrish?”

A couple of packs were set on the floor by the front door. Orla came and sat down on the couch, looking a little flushed and sweaty from her brief stint with manual labour. She eyed Ronan. Blue glowered at her as she relayed what Adam had said - or rather what he sounded like. She didn’t need Ronan to say anything to know that he was probably having an internal conniption. 

“We gotta go to Cambridge.”

“Whoa, hold up,” Orla said sharply. “We don’t know what’s going on.”

“This is causing—”

“I’mma stop you right there. We don’t know what _this_ is and until we have an idea of what it is, we don’t have a plan. We can’t formulate a plan of action and safety until we have some facts.”

“Mr. Gray said to avoid crowds and cities,” Blue said. Ronan whirled on her. 

“He what? How the fuck are we supposed to avoid cities when our friends _live in them_ ? My _brothers_?”

“Sit down!” Orla barked before Blue could retort. Ronan turned back to face her. He did not sit down. Instead, he just leaned back hard against the bookcase, knocking a few figures and crystals into the books on the shelves, and also knocked a tissue box and a box of restaurant crayons to the floor. He fingered the top part of the bat that Maura had laid against the bookcase earlier. Orla unfolded herself from the couch like a praying mantis reaching for its prey. “Get a hold of yourself, snake. Your boyfriend’s life depends on it. Understand?”

Maura came down from the attic with Gwenllian on her heels. Jimi piled another couple of backpacks onto the floor by the door. Calla fiddled with the buttons underneath the TV when there was a _fzzzzt!_ and Calla yelped, leaping back, holding out her hand. The tips of her fingers were rubbed raw as though she’d been burnt. Maura cursed something fierce, grabbed her hand, and Ronan snatched up the baseball bat and made as if to swing. But Orla put a hand on his arm at the same time as the TV flicking on. The screen was white and everyone in the room froze, even Calla who was nursing her fingers, even Gwenllian, who seemed to be transfixed. 

The image flickered, showing a news studio, and a handsome young man on the screen. Blue recognised him as Jackson Carruthers, a former Aglionby student, one of the mayor’s sons, and well-loved newscaster. He was paler than usual, his hair messed up, his suit rumpled. His hand shook as it held the news itinerary. “I interrupt your evening broadcast to bring you breaking news—” Behind him, the screen shifted to show footage of a city on fire. Blue’s blood ran cold when she thought it looked familiar— “Washington D.C. was under martial law until 8 A.M. this morning when quarantine failed and escalated into an all-out attack. President Trump has issued an executive order for troops to engage in chemical warfare with infected civilians—” 

“Gansey,” Blue breathed just as Ronan said, “ _Matthew_.”

The channel changed: “The WHO has advised all domestic travel be prohibited as the list of symptoms grows longer and more severe. As the number of cases here in the U.K. increase, we suggest keeping an eye on the most obvious, unique, and severe symptoms to date, such as sudden and severe coughing bouts resulting in blood-flecked saliva—” 

The channel changed: “President Trump has issued an executive order stating that all citizens must remain indoors and should you need to leave your house, you must have a military escort— oh, oh my _God_ , what—” Tomi Lahren’s face was turning into a river of blood as it poured from her eyes and nostrils and leaked over her lips. “—what’s happening to me? What’s— I can’t—!” Shrieks filled the air as her skin cracked, pieces sliding off her skull, a gurgling and then— 

The channel changed: “Death toll in North America skyrockets to over one hundred million cases in the last 48 hours—” Craig Melvin’s body began to twitch violently and contort. Bones snapped as his limbs bent to obscene angles; his body, his whole existence, seemed to spazz and vibrate, a blur of movement— 

The channel changed: Anderson Cooper was behind the counter; marquees at the bottom of the screen reading headlines such as **CITIES ERUPT IN PROTEST OVER VIRUS DEATHS AND PUBLIC POLICY** ; and then Anderson’s face was Adam’s. Blue could feel Ronan trembling beside her. Adam leaned forward, his face stricken, and said, “ _Hurry! HURRY. GET OUT NOW.”_

The house went dark as the power vanished again. Chainsaw squawked in surprise.

 _Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities_. 

Blue thought she was beginning to understand what he’d meant.

There was a brief silence and then, 

“We can no longer wait for Mr. Gray.” This was Maura and she sounded distant, reluctant, heavy. 

“Already done.” Calla held up a piece of printer paper beneath the light of a flashlight that read in simple calligraphy: “GRAY - GO TO BARNS.” Ronan looked at it with an unreadable expression on his face. She rummaged through a haphazard coffee table and pulled out tape and taped the paper to the bay window. Outside, the sky had grown darker but no less quiet. Car doors could be heard being shut, trunks opening and closing, people shouting at one another. 

“We can’t all just go rushing to the Barns—” Orla said. “First, we don’t even know if that’s _safe_ —”

“It’s the safest place we have access to,” Jimi said rather peaceably, considering. Blue looked indignant. 

“We didn’t even _ask_ —”

“It’s fine,” Ronan interjected sourly. He’d had a feeling the Barns was going to get busy. He didn’t begrudge the Fox Way women for coming to the same conclusion he had. A lot of unwanted thoughts and strange feelings he’d had for the past couple of months were starting to make more sense, like he’d been preparing for this. 

“But we don’t have enough information—” 

“Cities are being burned by the government; what more information do we need?”

“Oh, but I _do_ love a good burning!” Gwenllian pronounced very seriously. 

Ronan swung the bat in anger. “I need to get to Matthew and Declan.”

“We need to go into town.” Maura looked between herself and Calla. 

“Mom, _no_ —” Blue pleaded, her heart rate going from one to sixty in point five seconds flat. 

Maura held up a hand as if that could calm everyone’s anguish. Blue was struck by how strange everything was and how Persephone’s absence seemed to impact everything. “ _I_ need to go into town and find some information because we can’t figure out how to survive _that_ —” she gestured upward at the sky, “—and _that_ —” she pointed at the television, indicating the monstrous news reports of cities on fire, “—until we have a better idea of what the _hell_ is going on. The rest of you need to go to the Barns. I have a feeling it will be the safest. Yes, Blue, you need to go, too. You amplify things and I don’t want to risk the wrong things being amplified.”

Jimi tapped her chin. “Wards?”

Blue knew they were talking about protective wards to place around oneself or one’s space. There were some light wards around the house, ones that were more for positive vibes and energy than keeping out dangerous things. Blue doubted their effectiveness after Persephone’s death, but she’d doubted a lot of things after Persephone’s death. 

Maura nodded. “Wards.”

“You shouldn’t go into town alone,” said Ronan, an unnaturally caring thing for him to say. Maura regarded him evenly. 

“They can’t enter the Barns without you with them, Dreamer.”

“True, but he’s still right,” Orla intervened. “I’ll go with you, Maura.”

Jimi huffed. “Absolutely _not_ —”

Orla stood. “I’m the _best_ one in this household for getting answers out of people and you all know it! If we need information, _I’m_ your gal and that’s a _fact!_ And my phone is dead.” This last bit was added in a shocked tone, which contrasted with her previous indignation. 

Ronan made a knowing noise. Blue picked up her cell phone. The screen remained black no matter how many buttons she pressed. The other women all took out their phones, too, some flipping theirs open and closing and flipping open again, clicking buttons.

“Just like mine,” Ronan said. “Just like everything at the Barns.”

“What do you _mean_ everything at the Barns?” Orla demanded. 

Maura cut across before Ronan could spit back a retort. “Do you still feel the Barns is safe?” Blue liked that her mother treated Ronan as an authority. Chainsaw made an uncomfortable sound. 

Ronan shrugged in the dimness, the venom not having quite faded yet.  
“It’s where we’re supposed to go,” said Calla and Blue looked at her sharply, but before she could ask, Maura nodded, sighed, and said, “I think that may be a piece of the puzzle.” She ran a hand through her hair. “That settles it then. Calla, I need you to go with them. You need to try to help Ronan figure out what’s going on with the dream world and see if there’s any correlation.”

“Correlation to a virus that came out of Russia?” Orla asked. 

“It didn’t come from Russia,” Blue pointed out. “ _That_ is a conspiracy theory.”

Ronan and Calla regarded each other like two predators measuring each other up and realising that they were very well-matched. And then, in a gesture that seemed almost unfitting for Ronan, he tossed his car keys to Orla, who, despite her surprise and the darkness, caught them neatly in the palm of her hand. “You should take the BMW.”

“What, why?”

“It’s faster and safer than that— than your car,” Ronan amended, throwing even Blue off with his unusual courtesy. “We’ll meet you at the Barns though I’m not even sure the dream protections are even working anymore.” He didn’t add that Maura and Orla were volunteering to go into town right after they had been specifically warned to not just avoid crowds and towns, but to get out _now_. Ronan couldn’t get Adam’s face on Anderson Cooper’s body out of his mind. It was all wrong. It didn’t make _sense_. His heart was wrapped in iron that was squeezing the breath out of him any time his mind turned to Adam. 

Blue pushed around him at something on the bookshelf. She withdrew what looked to be two small white timers. She pressed a couple buttons and let out a sigh of relief when digital numbers appeared on their tiny screens. She handed one to Orla. “I set both of these timers to two hours. You have to be back at the Barns by the two hour mark or we come and find you.” Then Blue walked over to her mother and threw her arms around her. “I don’t want you to go again,” she whispered. 

Maura didn’t bother to lock up the house as they all spilled onto the front lawn. The hair on Blue’s arms stood on end as she looked upward at the sky for the millionth time. She wasn’t sure but it seemed as though the sky had grown even darker though it couldn’t be past two-thirty in the afternoon. She met Ronan’s eyes. They were shadowed and fraught with anger and malevolent determination, which made for an ominous contrast with the hatred-fueled gloominess of the sky above. Ronan was a ticking time bomb and this newly monstrous environment threatened an early release. 

“I’ll be right back,” Blue said across Ronan’s anger and made her way around the house to a path of grass that led to the backyard. There was a large beech tree there, towering next to the house, ancient, daunting, and reassuring all at once. Blue pressed her palm against the bark. The tree was sometimes home to her father, a dryad of sorts, and an adviser to an old Welsh king. She’d had mixed feelings about him ever since she discovered who he was, but over the last year of travelling and coming home to tree-like arms wrapping gently around her, seeing her father become more and more Artemus-like according to her mother, those feelings veered more on the side of positive than anything else. She had learnt to love him for him and he loved her for her and that’s really all anyone can ever hope for anyway. “Artemus, if you can hear me, if you’re really not going to come with us, please be safe. Please don’t…” She found that her throat had become thick with tears. She swallowed and started again, “Please don’t let any of the bad stuff happen to you.” What bad stuff, she didn’t know, but Blue stayed like that for a moment. Then she sighed and traipsed back around the house to the driveway. Blue hugged her mother again, perhaps a bit tighter this time to conceal her grief, or maybe to communicate it. 

Calla caught Ronan’s eye as she passed and slipped into the driver’s seat, the little straw doll and string of crystals trembling as the car rocked. Jimi took the passenger seat. Ronan, Blue and Gwenllian piled tightly into the backseat, Ronan’s misery the most obvious, Chainsaw unnaturally calm and docile in his lap. He wanted Adam. Matthew. Even Declan. Blue wanted Gansey. She wanted Henry. She _didn’t_ want her mother and Orla to go into town. She _didn’t_ want to leave her father behind. She _didn’t_ want to leave her childhood house behind. 

Their immediate neighbours didn’t seem to be out and about but looking down the street, she saw other people behaving similarly - shoving suitcases and other types of packs into the trunks of their cars, checking and double checking supplies, some trying to make phone calls, others staring at the sky. Blue didn’t want her mother and Orla to have to deal with _more of that_. And she couldn’t, by any means, give her mother enough of a hug to feel reassured. She watched Maura and Orla slide into Ronan’s sleek black fish of a BMW. They pulled out of the driveway first and Calla followed behind. 

They drove more slowly than usual, not just out of habit from not wanting to hit children playing in the streets or random stray cats, but because they _couldn’t_ go faster without hitting _something_. Several people were in the streets, even as they left Fox Way and turned onto the main road that cut through their neighbourhood. Blue was tucked unceremoniously between Ronan and Gwenllian and she looked out the window past Ronan. She saw three or four stray cats dart across the road and under a parked car. She saw a dog tied to a leash on a front lawn, barking, the nervous kind of barking, she guessed by the dog’s behaviour. People weren’t just standing and gawking and pointing at the sky. Others were arguing, their hands and arms being flung into the air in frustrated gesticulation. Others, still, had brought out _lawn chairs_ and were gathered on the lawns with drinks and popcorn, like being seated front row for the incoming disaster was the best way to _enjoy the incoming disaster_. They passed by an ambulance and someone setting off fireworks. They had all seen the news, right?

“Batshit,” Calla muttered. 

Blue could hear Calla bite her tongue on the silently added: _these are the people who are gonna die first and it will still be a tragedy._

She shook herself and told herself to calm down. It wasn’t an _apocalypse_. Yet. 

...right?

That was probably one of the most frustrating things: everything pointed to “end of the world.” She still couldn’t discern her feelings about what they’d all wanted on the television. Had a third of the United States population really been decimated in forty-eight hours? Were things really _that bad_ ? She couldn’t tell how she felt about the Gray Man’s warning, about Adam’s warning, about the monsters lurking in the sky, about Gansey missing. None of it felt real. She believed it but couldn’t process it. A _hundred million_ was a _lot_. The panic… _was a lot_. How could the news have just announced that a third of the United States was simply _gone_ and there were people sitting on lawn chairs drinking beer? 

Blue was sure that her Maura and aunts knew a lot more than they were saying, which Maura only did when she felt it would offend Blue to know the truth or the reality of the situation. Blue found this incredibly unhelpful as it only sought to rile her sensibility even more though she understood that this level of lying via omission came from a well-intentioned heart. It made her antsy and even more afraid. 

She glanced at Ronan. His own internal anguish manifested externally through the biting of his wristbands and incessant tapping upon his knee but Blue knew that he was seething with an overabundance of worry and anger and that the only thing that stopped him from expressing his rage further was a well-earned and ambivalent politeness reserved only for when Blue was with her family. In other words, Ronan didn’t want to break a window that would inconvenience the ladies of 300 Fox Way. There was no doubt that he was replaying everything in his head on a loop of self-flagellation. Blue couldn’t stop hearing Gansey’s last words in her head: _Listen, a lot is going on. My parents were—_ Blue couldn’t stop seeing Adam’s face on the body of Anderson Cooper. Had that been a manifestation from the same thing that caused Tomi Lahren to break down in tears of blood until her face fell apart? Or had Adam really been trying to warn them? And what of the Gray Man’s warnings? And what of the sky above, the sky so hung with clouds that, if Blue didn’t know better, she’d think there was nothing beyond those clouds, no sun, no moon, no stars; just an endless abyss within the belly of a beast that was slowly digesting them and their world?

The interstate was almost bumper-to-bumper. Ronan shifted restlessly beside her. Gwenllian, who normally would be loud and chipper in such times of chaos, was subdued, picking at leaves and twigs she’d purposely braided into her hair. Jimi made a noise of disapproval - not at the traffic itself but the fact that people were afraid enough to accidentally cause traffic, that urban infrastructure didn’t allow for panicked crowds of people to be able to evacuate quickly and freely, the fact there hadn’t been some organised mass evacuation effort. That was Jimi though; tough as nails and solid to the core, but tender and soft, and always taking care of those who were disadvantaged. She wouldn’t lament the disorganisation of people running from a situation. She would lament at the fact that some government entity hadn’t prepared for this. 

Calla drummed her fingers on the wheel and cursed under her breath in three languages. She snarled at the drivers around her, not because she actually blamed them for bad driving or for causing this mess, but because she didn’t have any other outlet. In a more preferable environment, Calla would be letting loose on a punching bag and not voicing unheard complaints directed at people she’d never know. 

“We’ll get off at the next exit,” Calla said, gesturing up the road. “We can’t stay on here.” She spoke like a parent scolding an empty classroom. Ronan shifted again, annoyed at himself, because he knew he was much more of an aggressive driver (which was an accomplishment) and he felt he’d get them out of there faster. He was anxious to get back to the Barns, to check on his dream things. To check on Opal, who had somehow remained conscious. To try Gansey again. To try Adam again. To gather some weapons and head to Cambridge, head to Cambridge, head to Cambridge. 

_Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities_. 

Eventually, they made it off the exit and Calla, familiar with the area, veered onto side road after side road. Any time she saw any semblance of traffic, her hands worked the wheel quickly enough to turn around and go in a different way. It was roundabout, but effective, and even Ronan had to sit back and not quietly admonish her because _he_ certainly didn’t know the area like _that_. As the time passed, the sky grew darker. Blue checked her little timer and saw that only an hour had passed. She then tried to forget about it. 

Blue was idly gazing out the window with her head on Ronan’s shoulder when she jolted upward. She had seen— but— _no_ , that couldn’t be right…

“What is it, Sargento?” Ronan asked, playing a game they always played where he’d nickname her all kinds of random oddities ranging from mildly offensive to anyone who wasn’t Blue to just down right nonsensical. 

“That’s a terrible name,” she pointed out, squinting over his lap out the window. “What _is_ that—” 

“What’s what?” Ronan followed her gaze. Shadowy figures were darting in between trees as the car drove on. They were moving _fast_ \- both car and shadows. At first, Blue had thought she was imagining them, but the more she looked, the more corporeal they became - definitely humanoid, sometimes. Sometimes, with mouths too big for the head, and sharp, predatorial teeth. They were vastly asymmetrical, and they revelled in their own asymmetry. 

_YRRRRREAAAHHHHHHI_

The wailing pierced the air and faded as quickly as it had come as Calla snapped, “Oh _hell_ no” and slammed on the gas. 

_YAAAHHHRHHHHH--SKKS-SKS-SKS--TCHTCHTCHTCH—_

“The _fuck_ —” Ronan’s arm shot out to prevent Blue from careening into the windshield as Calla spun the car around to avoid hitting a massive lump of wood or textiles that looked to have been dumped in the middle of the road as though they’d fallen off a supply truck. Shadows picked their way at the edges of the forest on either side of the car, hissing, jaws snapping, vanishing and reappearing. 

_Sks-sks-sks—- tchtchtchtch—_

The sound was softer now. 

And as Calla only paused to take a breath, Blue realised that the massive lump of textiles that blocked their road was not a lump of textiles at all but a lump of carcasses. She heard Calla suck in a breath at the sight. Jimi murmured something, a prayer perhaps. Gwenllian’s presence was only made loud because of her unhabitual taciturn attitude. Even in the starkness of the fallen night, the lights from the car highlighted the carcasses, which looked fresh and mangled, blood glistening over fur, bones gleaming, blank stares of dead deer. Blue felt her heart clench. She remembered the deer skeletons in the cave last year. Seeing a pile of meat, blood and bones, while truly gruesome, felt _very personal_ , like this was specifically directed at her, Ronan, and Gwenllian. Gwenllian clutched Blue’s hand so tightly it hurt, but Blue didn’t complain. She understood. 

Calla took a moment to regain her breath and then she drove back down the road, away from the carcasses. Blue turned uncomfortably to watch out the rear windshield and saw a dead deer clamber to its legs, watching them drive away with glowing eyes. 

When they turned back onto a four-lane highway, it was nearly deserted. And as they passed beneath each street lamp, the lights went out, leaving the world behind them entrenched in an impenetrable darkness. 

_☣_

[Map (spoilery and a work-in-progress)](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1dhfmY-bO7kFMfq4xjtWl19x--NvtlHFV&usp=sharing)


	3. t h e      c a l l

_To see a world in a grain of sand_  
And a heaven in a wild flower,   
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand  
And eternity in an hour.

_\- William Blake_

## iii. t h e c a l l 

300 Fox Way [1:47:37 PM, or perhaps 5:16:04 PM]

_“‘Quarantine’ has the same connotation as ‘extermination’ at this point. The President doesn’t care and neither does his Swamp._

The Gray Man arrived at 300 Fox Way several minutes before everyone else had left. He saw the sign taped to the inside of the front window but still, he went to the front door. The writing wasn’t forged, but with the chaos happening in the streets, with people outside, milling around in casual groups, dragging out suitcases and packing cars, sitting on lawns with beers, he had doubts about all forms of authenticity when everything suddenly seemed dangerous, poisonous, and vengeful. Though Mr. Gray couldn’t explain why he felt that way. It was irrational, on the surface, and he did not like irrational feelings but part of it also felt _instinctual_ , and Mr. Gray _did_ appreciate instinct. 

His hand hovered above the doorknob to the main entrance of 300 Fox Way. The doorknob was innocuous; just a shiny, brassy thing with scrapes and scratches from wear. Unassuming. _Regular_. Except that Mr. Gray felt that if he put his hand on the knob, it would bite him. Or, perhaps, sting him. Or electrocute him. Or shove spikes through his hand. 

He blinked. Withdrew his hand. His lips were set and stern. 

Mr. Gray did not like being defeated by oddities. But he could ignore the feeling in his gut that told him it was better that he turn around, get in the Evo, and drive away. _Get in the damn car, you fool_ , some part of his mind hissed at him. He glanced at Orla’s sign again, thought for a moment, and then listened to himself and headed back to the Evo. Behind him, standing just beyond the glass of the frontward-facing bay window, several pairs of eyes watched him go but the Gray Man was unaware of this. The Gray Man paused at the driver side door and looked up at the sky and then he got in the car. It was a good thing he left when he did because he did not see the crack slowly form on the window or the serpentine shadow that creeped and crawled towards the driveway from beneath the porch. 

He drove as quickly as he could over country roads towards Singers Falls. It was neither disappointing or unsurprising but the Gray Man still found a part of himself a tad surprised and mostly disappointed: like much of the country, public opinion on the usefulness of masks was divided and bipartisan. Like much of the country, the lockdown was a hotly debated topic - it was fact that it hurt small businesses and Henrietta, made up of small businesses (though that was rapidly changing), showed a lot of ‘closed’ and ‘closed for good’ signs. The Gray Man did not necessarily blame the lockdown itself for hurting Henrietta’s recently booming economy, but rather the federal government for denying widespread loans for small businesses to handle the economic dropout. The Gray Man also had largely ignored politics whenever he could because to pay attention would mean to have beliefs, take a side, assume an identity, and those things had proved inconsequential and dangerous to his previous job as a hit man. But to date Maura, to engage with her family, to be there for Blue and her friends, was to _be_ political, and the Gray Man, still coming to terms with his renewed sense of humanity, had allowed himself to be educated a great deal. To remain neutral on a lot of topics was to, indeed, empower the authority, the oppressor so to speak. He had questions about implementation and public policy, but in the end, he was on the side of humanity, on the side of the planet, and these were not beliefs to be trifled with. Henrietta was a divided small town in a blue state and he found himself feeling tragically about small business owners and the elderly and the ones with autoimmune diseases and the young. He found himself, though not in an overtly emotional sense mostly due to being on autopilot, lamenting the scenes that befell him as he drove out of the city: people milling around, maybe half the population or less wearing masks, gesturing at the sky, trying to get their various forms of technology to work, leaning against cars, drinking, “chilling,” and the Gray Man was filled with a sort of rueful disdain for humans. This was a trait he shared with Blue and they’d discussed this often. 

_“They aren’t taking in the sick to be saved.”_

The Gray Man managed to make his way out of Henrietta and onto Sperryville Pike. For a two lane interstate running through Basically Nowhere, Virginia, for the time of day, it was startling busy without being packed. The amount of cars on the road normally would have no impact on the Gray Man for he still disassociated quite frequently from the everyday troubles of life, his emotions controlled and even, but on this day, he felt a twinge of irritation. He wanted to get to Maura. He wanted to see Blue. He even wanted to check in on the Lynch boy. He could do none of these things if people were behaving like _sheer dumbasses_ on the road. 

_“They’re gonna level Eastern seaboard cities next_ , _” Amy Brittain had said, in another phone call just that morning, her Alabama accent slipping through her professionalism. “Get out of the cities. Get into the country.”_

_“I_ am _in the country, if you do so remember.”_

_“Two hours from D.C. isn’t going to be enough if they drop nukes on the entire metropolis.”_

_Mr. Gray was momentarily skeptical, even though Amy had never given him false information before but it didn’t matter because what she said next was:_

_“There is a mass media blackout. They were going to report the death toll in America at one-hundred million. I want you to know that’s going to be a lie. The number is way more than that. Almost double. Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities.”_

He was gearing up for the next exit when that familiar whirring of helicopter blades ahead and the Gray Man saw three military helicopters racing ahead. F.T. Valley Road was blocked off but it didn’t matter; the Gray Man was looking skyward. He thought he could depict packages falling from their sides and the Gray Man barely had time to duck and throw his hands over his head as the road ahead of him erupted into flame. He was outside the immediate shock wave radius, but debris still blew plast, and the Evo rocked a bit. He counted to thirty before he lifted his head. If he had been anyone else, what he saw ahead of him, less than a mile or so, would have sent him into a state of shock shortly followed by panic. But he was not just anyone else and he was still numb to the core when he saw that the pike had erupted into flame. 

The Gray Man was getting the hell out of there. His desire to reach Maura and the Barns - only to see that everyone was safe, not to ensure his own safety - was reaching a peak. Sperryville was just behind the wall of fire and as he picked up speed, bracing himself, he saw the way the fire licked at the sky, he saw skeletons of cars lit from the inside out, saw people out on the tarmac, heard sirens, heard—

Instinct told him to help. Instinct told him he couldn’t fight the military. Instinct told him to find Maura.

Contrary to popular belief, it can be really dark inside fire but the Gray Man was in and out in seconds. The Evo rolled to a stop and he flung himself from the car, rolling away to his feet in case it exploded. Behind them, several hundred metres, the fire raged on. It hadn’t hit the town yet but the smoke was devastating. It was as though it had been dropped to prevent exits.

Shirt over his nose, the Gray Man blinked through teary eyes. 

Was it just his imagination or did the Evo come closer to him?

The Gray Man backed up on the tarmac, stumbling, hissing in pain. He was at the edge of some parking lot. 

The Evo rolled forward. Wind gusts from the fire behind it, probably. 

He believed Amy. She was an excellent contact, an investigative reporter working for _The Washington Post_. Maura had told him to go make friends so he had. Sort of. Mostly, he salvaged the few relationships he had with acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances of his former employer, Colin Greenmantle. He had supplied information about Greenmantle’s old circle, which had extended far and wide and into places that were dark and dangerous, a web that had been torn open upon Greenmantle’s death, but not entirely shredded. Amy Brittain was swift and effective, perhaps too good, in fact, for she had stumbled upon some secrets that had been possibly inevitable. With the truth out and with Maura’s advice, the Gray Man allowed himself to be Dean Allen for an hour as he explained magic and ley lines. 

People change when you show them magic really exists. 

The Gray Man was lucky: Amy’s change had been only improvement. 

Maura won fifty bucks from Calla, Dean gained another friend, and some of his own investigative skills had found a way to be lucrative once again, but for the better. 

However, in this moment things were rapidly getting worse and the Gray Man’s veins were cold, his skin was feverish, his shoulder ached where he’d landed upon it from vacating the Evo so haphazardly. His brain supplied him with images of shadowy shapes in the flames, with the smells of burnt flesh and metal, with the sounds of crying and pleading. And the Evo seemed to beckon him closer. 

The obnoxious White Mistake did not explode. 

Limping, coughing into his shirt, the Gray Man made his way to the car. The driver’s side door was still open. He looked up at the fire billowing into the sky, the sky that just ate it up like the hungry beast it was. He sat gingerly in the driver’s side. The door closed. Had he closed it? Breathing was difficult. Smoke was circulating through the car’s vents. This couldn’t be safe. This couldn’t be safe. The Gray Man knew all about fire. This was impossible. 

This was _impossible_. 

He started the car. 

It did not explode. 

He shifted. 

It did not explode. 

As he turned off the current main drag onto a side road, he heard, felt, and saw the racing of ambulances and police cars behind him as they turned onto the Pike. He really ought to go back and help. But his medical knowledge was limited to immediate and basic survival. But still. He could pull people from wrecks. He could carry people. 

No, he would not. 

The Gray Man knew it was best to seek shelter, make sure loved ones were safe as they could be, and learn as much as could be learnt about whatever the hell was going on. The sky was a threatening mass above him. Technology flickered in and out. Explosions occurred on highways. _Stay away from crowds. Stay away from cities_. 

D.C. was not the only place being burnt to the ground. This was not a Henrietta event. This was not a Virginia event. This was not an American event. 

This was a global catastrophe. 

His heart was racing. And still, the Evo did not explode. 

The sky was suddenly very dark. This wouldn’t have been anything unusual except that 1) the sun should have been visibly high in the sky and it wasn’t and 2) it was darker than dark, like a heavy blanket stacked upon a heavy blanket stacked upon another heavy blanket, only less comforting and more suffocating. The staleness in the air diffused into the Evo. The Gray Man was not one who was easily shaken and even so, he was much less shaken than anyone else alive in that moment. Which only meant that he still had his wits about him but he couldn’t let go of the images of the pike enveloped in flame, or the shadowy shapes he saw burning within, or the Evo rolling forward, or the way it felt to go through fire. He had a very distinct feeling that while everything seemed so dead, it was all very much alive. He had a very distinct feeling that while most living things tended to leave humans alone, all of the living things now wanted humans dead. 

_Maura, Maura, Maura_ , his heart strummed. He hoped beyond hope that they were safe; and he wondered beyond wonder if they knew what the world was coming to; surely, this sort of malice didn’t play any more kindly with those who peered into other worlds. 

The Gray Man and his Evo skirted not-so-smoothly around a corner, oblivious to the lone traffic light staring off in the distance, alien mosses and leaves hanging from it as though at it had been in use for a thousand years. Lee Highway was apocalyptically empty. He coughed some more and his shoulder screamed at him. He should reach Singers Falls, to reach the Barns hidden away in its country alcove, soon, but now the roads kept stretching forward and around like a twisted puzzle and time felt irrelevant, nonsensical. 

It should have been a couple minutes. 

_It felt like an hour._

Maybe he was just imagining things - something he was not particularly known for doing.

He had _known_ for sure that he was going in the right direction when he turned onto the highway, which meant he was supposed to have had a good three or four minutes before he reached the first road of many that would take him to the Barns. He _knew_ when he got off on the gravelly, pot-hole ridden road that lead towards the Barns that he should have another ten or fifteen minutes of driving. Yet the Gray Man could not help but feel he was being gaslit. The EMF readers were off; they sat on the passenger seat like dead things, or muted things, or silent, angry things. His pistol was under his thigh. He didn’t trust it next to the EMF readers. He didn’t trust it without it touching some part of his body. He didn’t trust it in a holster where a shadowy hand could reach for it from the backseat. 

His nerves were blazing. 

Country Road 660, so it was named because backwoods roads sometimes were like that, curved into further darkness, taunting him. The moon should have been detectable, even behind a lamentable amount of cloud cover, even through the overarching canopies of trees, but it was as though the moon no longer existed. Or maybe the sun no longer existed to be able to illuminate the moon. Either scenario was truly troublesome. The road ascended slightly as he drove around the bend. Not a single other car was in sight, not even the occasional ones he’d see parked alongside the road. He glanced at his watch for the briefest of seconds, an old habit hard to forgo, and didn’t even bother to let out a sigh when he saw that the watch was as useless as it had been an hour prior. 

Surely, _surely_ , he was going the right way— 

Not taking his eyes off the road, the Gray Man flicked on the radio—

“YEEEEEeeeeEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeAHHHHhhAHHHHHHH! HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA--shhH--SHHh--CHHhh—-AHHHHHHHhhHHHHHHH—”

He hurriedly switched it off, his heart pounding, his breath taken away from the sudden onslaught of blood curdling noise. His skin was gooseflesh. _Simle þreora sum þinga gehwylce ær his tiddege to tweon weorþeð: adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete fægum fromweardum feorh oðþringeð. The sword’s death..._ he thought grimly. 

_Maura, Maura, Maura_ , his heart repeated again.

This time he glanced in the rearview mirror - well, it had meant to be _only_ a glance, but he couldn’t help but watch in growing fear and awe as the mirror warped, as his eyes slid inward towards themselves and away again towards his ears, and then began to droop down his face and then the image faded like someone splashed water upon a watercolour painting. In the reflection now was his rearview window. And in the rearview window, down, down, down stretches of darkened country road, was another type of darkness. 

And this, _this time_ , the Gray Man felt another surgance of fear - a fear that wasn’t his own. Overhead, the sky groaned but his car also groaned, or moaned, or something that sounded like a mixture of scraping metal and desperation. There was a cloud of desolation behind him - a quarter of a mile away, perhaps, but moving fast, barely noticeable in the heavy hanging sky, in the trees that swallowed up the road. 

If the Gray Man didn’t know better - and he _didn’t_ know better - he would have said the _Evo_ was scared, too. His foot barely touched the accelerator when the car accelerated. Gravel crunched beneath angry tires. The dark cloud in the rearview mirror was getting closer. 

They - the Gray Man and his car because now they were there together, as a team - descended down the road, past driveways that led to other hidden properties, towards Thorofare Gap. A guard rail appeared on the right side of the road indicating a steep drop off. The Barns should be less than five minutes away if the roads weren’t blocked. If he drove faster. 

The Evo’s headlights glared bright, brighter than the Gray Man remembered, bright enough to pierce the shadows ahead but he saw shapes and figures dart away, briefly saw mouths open wide, with dripping fangs, hissing as they passed. Claws raked at the Evo. 

_DEAN!_

It was Maura’s voice - or the Gray Man’s imagining of her voice inside his head. He saw the way the light made her hair shimmer, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she laughed, her snarky grin—

The image of her in his mind’s eye was a mixture of her laughing joyously and her beckoning him, urging him towards her. Come home, come home, hurry, hurry—

The Evo cried out as it swerved onto another side road. The shadowy cloud had caught up - it was a mass of ghosts and creatures, things with eyes too big for their heads, with teeth that carved canals into their own chins, mouths with unhinged jaws, tongues that lolled, a thousand dead—

Hurry, hurry, hurry—

He tried to go faster but he was no longer in control. The Evo was scared out of its mind and went fast, much too fast on such roads, but it didn’t matter — two minutes, less—

The Gray Man could see the faces in the rearview window; felt shadows fall in over his heart as the sky became impossibly darker—

One minute, he could just barely make out the glimmer he looked for whenever he needed to find the Barns, something Niall must’ve created, a signal or a sign—

Please, please hurry, we’re here— was Maura’s voice in his head.

It was a voice that wasn’t a voice, but a feeling. Strident urgency. Fear. Lots of fear. 

Thirty seconds—

The Evo squealed as the shadows crawled up the trunk, clawed at the sides, trying to tear metal from metal and the Gray Man had the pistol in his hand without remembering when he grabbed it. The rearview mirror was yanked out of its position— 

Twenty seconds—

HURRY, DEAN!

Shadowy tendrils stroked his neck, sharp points pricked his skin—

He wanted to hold her. 

Side view mirrors were ripped off—

Ten seconds--

His hands were not on the steering wheel. His hands were on the steering wheel.

There was the turn. There was a dreamer, waiting for him. 

There it iwasthereitwasthereitwa—-

Three--two—

_DEAN!_

As part of the roof came off, the Evo squealed onto the gravel road of the Barns, the remains of its back half spinning out and finally coming to a stop. 

The Gray man stumbled out of the car, landing painfully on his hands and knees. The shadow of monsters rammed into an invisible barrier and a loud, discordant chorus of wails rose up in frustration, in anger, in _hate_. The cloud rose up and up and up, disappearing beyond the tree line into the sky. Faces pressed into the invisible barrier, sneering, staring, scowling, glaring—

The entire world shuddered violently. 

And then the cloud dissipated leaving the Gray Man and his car breathless and trembling. 

◈ ◈ ◈

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. [04:10:37 PM, or perhaps 02:13:50 AM the following morning]

Declan was holed up inside Apollo 11 and he was irritated and angry and afraid. To be more precise, he was holed up in the _command module_ , named Columbia, for Apollo 11. The module was a blunted, metal, cone-like object with five windows. One window was for the crew hatch, which was how Declan had gotten he and Matthew inside. The other four windows were split evenly on either side and they were significantly smaller and were angled so the astronauts could look up in the direction they were going. The command module had sat atop its service counterpart and _that_ was what sat atop the _Saturn V_ rocket, which launched _Columbia_ and its service module into space. Upon the module would have been the lunar lander, nicknamed _Eagle_ , which had landed on the Moon and allowed astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to walk upon the lunar surface. Twenty-one hours and thirty-six minutes later, the two astronauts rejoined their colleague Michael Collins in _Columbia_. The three men spent more than eight days total in space. They arrived home safely, as heroes. And Declan was sitting there, with this high school information in the back of his mind, sweating, heart palpitating, stomach burning, hoping _Columbia_ ’s successes in keeping its occupants safe were not long gone, stuck in the 60s. Declan hoped beyond hope that he, too, would be able to clamber out of the module at some point, alive, unthreatened, youngest brother in tow. 

He wanted to leave safely even though he would never be a hero. 

Behind him, behind the three-seat couch that the module employed, on the floor in a sea of towels and non-descript space blankets he’d taken from the gift shop a room over, was Declan’s brother, Matthew, mostly in a stupor, eyes staring off into space before they’d shut down and he’d fall into a semi-slumber. The slumber was an anomalous side effect of being a dream object - or, rather, a dream _person_ , and it was such that even the slumber itself was anomalous in that very moment. Dream _things_ slept when their dreamer died, but Matthew wasn’t a _thing_ really; yet there he was, comatose, sleeping peaceably; he was restless, and oftentimes, completely lucid and aware. Then, something would happen within the fabric of time and space, and he’d shudder, and fall to the ground. The first time it had happened a couple hours ago, or maybe a day ago, Declan had thought Matthew was having a seizure and rushed to turn him on his side. But Matthew wasn’t having a seizure and his breathing, though sometimes erratic, had remained consistent even as he fell into an uneasy sleep. It hadn’t been like the cows. It hadn’t been like any of the other living things at the Barns. It hadn’t been like...

Which meant there was a small chance that Ronan was still alive. 

Declan would have laid Matthew upon either of the three crew couches within the module but they were in full view of the windows and he wanted Matthew out of harm’s way if anyone came in firing. Because there had been a lot of people outside with guns less than a day ago and he didn’t trust that they weren’t still there. The food court had caught fire earlier but it seemed to have been put out not more than thirty minutes ago (or had it been two hours ago? Declan was losing track of time). Declan had been in the city when he’d met up with Matthew outside Mr. Henry’s (Matthew’s choice despite Declan’s alternate suggestions). Restaurants were still under lockdown, reservations had to be made, IDs flashed upon arrival, and soldiers patrolled sidewalks, a dystopian painting. But some restaurants served food outside and the weather had been comfortable, if not on the humid and dreary side, for a May Saturday at Capitol Hill. After food, Declan had driven them past the White House, parked, and they’d walked around, and had been sitting near the Washington Monument when hell erupted. The skies had been hanging low already so it took longer than usual for people outside to realise there was something wrong. 

But everyone felt it. 

Declan didn’t know if his mind dramatised even his most recent memories or if things just happened so fast, his mind was still playing catch-up or if there was a truth to all of it, but he felt like everything escalated within seconds. It started with a feeling. It then continued as a deep groan emitting from the sky and a lot of people craning their necks, looking upward to try to find the source of the sound. It escalated to troops swarming the capitol as people began to shriek and wail and fall to the ground to writhe in contorted agony. And then the firebombing began. 

He couldn’t connect the dots between the White House erupting in flame and him and Matthew taking shelter in a Smithsonian. He tried to replay the events between sitting serenely on a bench in the National Mall and sitting, crouched, in the pilot’s seat within the Apollo 11 command module in the National Air and Space Museum. Only glimpses of the past reality came to Declan’s mind: realising that D.C. was being intentionally set on fire, realising this meant that it had been decided that the citizens of D.C. had been deemed unsavable, realising that he and Matthew were out in the open, unprotected, unarmed, with nowhere to go. 

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Natural History both had been consumed. Declan didn’t know enough about military strategy to understand his circumstances. Sure, he knew about napalm, but he didn’t know where he and his brother could go that would be safe. The National Air and Space Museum was one of the few places without fire, so he and Matthew had tried to stealthily make their way there and that was how they’d ended up in the Apollo module. _Columbia_ hadn’t been Declan’s first choice but something large had crashed behind them in the darkness of one of the side hallways and Declan had taken a calculated risk and chose _Columbia_ over _Skylab_ and that was it. 

Declan was sweaty, hot, cramped, tired but wired, and he had to piss. 

The crashing sound didn’t happen again nor did Declan ever see what had caused it. 

With the lack of electricity, with back-up generators failing, the museum was already stifling and hot and being inside the module was worse, but Declan knew he’d rather be in there than outside. He had considered going to the basement, which he assumed existed, but honestly wasn’t sure, because basements could be tombs in events such as these. He wondered, constantly, if Skylab would have been a better choice or more of a beacon. He tried not to think about Ronan, but with Matthew trembling in a tumultuous slumber beside him and within the midst of his fear for his youngest brother’s life, all he could think about was Ronan. Dreaming either had something to do with the virus or the virus was affecting Ronan in a way that made dreams unstable, and Declan didn’t know which was worse. 

He must have nodded off. 

Or maybe he hadn’t. He’d closed his eyes for only a second, or maybe a couple hours, and only woke for a moment, disoriented, wondering what had forced his eyes open. His brain was on high alert. Declan blinked and then his heart stopped. 

The long, wide beam of a flashlight swept the darkened room. 

_Shit, shit, shit, shit_. 

He leapt over the three-seated crew couches and crouched beside Matthew. Angling himself so that his back was against the wall of the guidance and navigation station part of the module, Declan shifted the blankets so they mostly covered his brother, and then he nudged Matthew further beneath the crew couches. The module creaked with age as he moved and he paused every so often to listen. He, then, steadied himself against the module, rotary dials and knobs to equipment Declan didn’t understand pressed into his back. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable position - in fact, the whole module was uncomfortable. Declan wasn’t used to moving in such small spaces. The fact that three, full-grown male astronauts had been able to maneuver through such a craft… Declan cursed his own cracking knees and the aching tension in his thighs and the stiffness that was difficult to shake out. Yeah, he probably should have taken them to Skylab. He peered out of the corner of the window. Eyes adjusted to the darkness, Declan could make out several figures silhouetted in the dim light that streamed in through the windows. He spotted several flashlights as well as a couple headlights. They were soldiers and they were in formation. 

It was in that moment that the lights in the museum flickered on for a second, went out, flickered on for several more seconds, and then went out again. 

“Declan?” came Matthew’s tiny, worried voice. “Declan?!”

“Shhhh!” Declan hissed. “It’s me, I’m here, but we have to be quiet.” Matthew was squirming, having sat up, nearly bumping his head on the crew couches. Declan grabbed him, pulled his brother to his lap. Matthew flinched and twisted, confused, not entirely lucid, unaware. 

“Declan?”

“Be quiet, Matthew, they’re—”

He cut himself off, slapped a hand over Matthew’s mouth, and went completely still. A flashlight swept over the forward side of the module. Declan crouched lower. He disdained the idea of a higher power; why would he believe in some Biblical deity when he had a dreamer for a brother, a dreamer for a father, and a dream for a brother? He’d seen enough “miracles” to understand that other forces were at play here and they were all variations of _human_. But even so, outside his disdain, deep down he silently prayed, hoped, pleaded that the lights would remain off, that Matthew would still, that the humans outside the module would leave. 

_Tap-tap-tap._

One of the soldiers was rapping on the window closer to the forward. Declan briefly wondered if they could hear his pounding heart. There would be nowhere to hide if all the soldiers decided to heavily investigate the module. The module was no bigger than a minivan and the windows were placed to reveal almost all corners. And Declan had no doubts that he and Matthew would be killed on sight, not after he’d witnessed the seemingly indiscriminate bombing of the other Smithsonians, which should have been mostly vacant since the lockdowns placed earlier in the year, and the fire that consumed the White House. Declan didn’t allow himself to form close attachments, one out of self-preservation, two out of self-punishment, but he still lamented the fact that he’d known a couple of White House aides and he wondered if they’d been able to make it to safety or if they’d perished. He wondered if Senator Jim Rankin and his personal assistant, Fairlady Banks, made it out in time. 

Declan could hear the sounds of muffled chatter from the soldiers, conversation and orders being given. More flashlights swept the module. It was going to come down to a fight, he knew it, and it would be a fight that he would lose. He was a skilled boxer, and under normal circumstances, such as a bar fight, Declan probably would win. He’d have the full range of a familiar environment. But here, inside _Columbia_ , he was cornered. Trapped. And he had a body to protect, a bladder threatening to explode, and absolutely no weapons. 

_Columbia_ may have carried three astronauts to the Moon and back, but Declan had turned it into a tomb. He could already see Niall shaking his head in disappointment. _Fuck you, Dad, you didn’t prepare me for this end-of-the-world bullshit_. 

The crew hatch creaked open and Declan felt the module shake and glancing over the crew couches, he saw that a soldier had actually entered the module, perched just on a ledge, ducked down and peering in. 

It was as though time slowed down. Declan’s eyes were perfectly attuned to the darkness and the soldier was now isolated. Saw the soldier crouch. Knees. Gun pointed towards the navigation deck. A heavy grade gas mask with a respirator on. A flash of exposed flesh. _Never underestimate your enemy_. Niall’s voice in his head. _But don’t hesitate to focus on weaknesses and mistakes._

The soldier never should have entered the module. 

Declan, head bowed appropriately to avoid hitting the ceiling, suddenly powered through the stiffness in his body and vaulted over the crew couches. He landed on a knee on the one nearest to the soldier, swung out an arm, his hand flat, striking the soldier in the neck. A punch to the upper arm with the same hand, a punch to the thigh with the other. A grab for the M249, yanking the gun out of the soldier’s hands, and a thrust between the legs. 

The soldier went down and as he did so, Declan, leaning on the one knee, brought up his other leg, knocking hard into the mask with the other knee. Pain went through his kneecap but Declan didn’t slow. Don’t stop and think about the pain. He grabbed for the mask as shouts rose up from outside, turning his fingers into claws, scraping at fabric and flesh and pulling desperately at hair like a bat straight outta hell. A slip, a shout, a sputter. Declan kneed the soldier in the face and kicked him back out of the module, where he fell to the floor. 

Declan, now armed, ducked, shouldered the rifle and aimed. _Thanks, Dad_ , he thought sardonically, and fired back. Bullets sprayed across the module and Declan ducked again. Glass cracked, metal punctured. He had to get out of the module in case the soldiers threw grenades. He had to get them away from Matthew. He backed out, waited for their volley to finish, ducked again as more glass sprayed around him. He stumbled out of the hatch and down onto the floor of the museum, overestimating the height from the entrance to the ground, and misstepping. Pain shot up his ankle. _Get away from the module_. 

“Where is it?”

Declan noted the usage of the pronoun ‘it’ with grim satisfaction and a thrill of horror. 

Behind the module was a glass case showcasing the earliest one-man vessels that went into space, such things holding people like Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin. Only a few yards away in front of the module were the pillars of rockets. To the right of _Columbia_ was _Skylab_. Declan did some quick calculations, took in a breath and darted those few yards to hide behind one of the larger rockets. He peered around in the darkness, blinking against the light from the headlamps, aimed, and fired. He fired until he was out of ammo, dropped the weapon, and in the confused frenzy, he darted back towards the module and around _Skylab_. Briskly snuck up on one soldier, knocked him in the head, came up from behind, grabbed him around the throat while simultaneously sweeping the soldier’s legs out from beneath him. Declan let the body crumple to the floor, ripped off the mask, and rained down fists before jumping up and dashing past _Gemini_ as glass exploded behind him. _Away from the module, away from the module, away from the module_. 

The soldiers shouted at one another but nothing made sense to Declan as he claimed shadow as his cloak of invisibility and came up behind another soldier. But this time, he slipped, overestimated his momentum, and the soldier had an arm, twisting it behind. Pain exploded over his shoulder and Declan, desperate and without thinking, swung his other fist, but met Kevlar. 

“I’m human!” he spat out, and his other arm was also restrained. 

The lights flickered and Declan took advantage of the half second of perplexity to wrench himself from the soldier’s grip. The soldier’s rifle clattered to the floor and Declan, stumbling over the carpet, scooped it up and swung. The gun met a facemask and the first soldier staggered off. Someone was calling for backup. Declan interrupted that call by using all of his weight to yank the soldier’s head to the side with a sickening crack. The guilt would hit him later as he tried not to think about it. 

Lights came on. 

And then he was surrounded by the remaining four soldiers. One called for backup. They were standing equidistant from each other and far enough away that Declan couldn’t make any movements without being mowed down. He was completely enveloped in light. He held up his hands, trembling. “I am human,” he said, loudly and clearly. A shadowy figure was moving behind the soldiers. He didn’t know why they were hesitating _now_ , not when buildings were on fire and everyone seemed to be getting shot on sight. “I promise, I mean no—” 

_WHAM_. 

The shadowy figure behind the soldiers launched a fist that connected squarely with a cheek and he went down. The shadowy figure hit him in the head with the blunt end of the gun. 

The lights blinked out. 

Declan moved out of the line of fire, moved left, came up on the left-flanking soldier, and got right up in his face. _Get close, get confusing. Disorient._ The right-flanking soldier made to fire but—

The lights flickered on for just a—

Pain in Declan’s shoulder seared. 

The shadowy figure morphed into curly-haired Matthew, who was flushed with his victory—

The lights went out. 

Declan blinked out the rainbow paramecia out of his eyes. 

Loud footsteps thundered across the hall. Backup had arrived. 

“ _DOWN, MATTHEW!_ ” 

_P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-PAH!_

_Shit!_

The lights came back on and stayed on.

Declan dove to the ground, garnering some decent rug burns as he threw his arms over his head. Behind him, space modules tipped out of their display case and crashed to the floor. A missile clattered beside him, narrowly missing his head. When the noise dimmed, Declan dared look up. Matthew was not far from him, on his knees, hands behind his head. They were surrounded by a small _battalion_. 

There were only two outcomes to this: 1) they’d be killed or 2) they’d be marched alive to some facility where they’d go through tests to prove they didn’t have any infections and all the truths about Matthew would come out, that he didn’t really have a blood type, that he didn’t really age much, that he didn’t really—

Just then, the soldiers began to scream. 

They writhed and twisted like worms in a can. Matthew covered his ears. Declan motioned for Matthew and the two brothers scooted across the floor towards one another. Weapons fell to the floor. Matthew buried his face into Declan’s chest but Declan watched, his heart racing, as fabric peeled off of bodies, as skin melted off of bones, as, in unimaginable agony, a soldier teetered against one of the rockets and instead of just sliding to the floor, the rocket warped and enveloped the soldier’s decaying body, and white and black paint coated bone as the soldier became part of the rocket. Another soldier had retained his skin but his hands were falling off, and then his kneecaps separated, causing him to crumple and pass out from the pain. All around them were varying levels of horrors. A soldier’s face exploded within his mask. A tree grew out of another’s chest. Something ate another from within, consuming the corpse like a black hole. 

It didn’t take long but it felt like forever to Declan. 

When silence fell, he and Matthew were surrounded by twitching, oozing corpses all in various stages of decay. Shakily, he made to stand up but the lights went out. 

Matthew went limp in his arms. 

Declan laid him down gently. The pain was still rife in his ankle and his shoulder, and the skin along his arms burned, but he stepped off to the side, edged himself away from the corpses, and relieved himself just beside the shattered module display case. 

◈ ◈ ◈

Downtown Henrietta [02:49:08 PM, or perhaps 06:09:33 PM]

What was normally a fifteen minute drive turned into an hour and not simply because of the insane amount of traffic. Henrietta was a small town, one that often competed with its closest big neighbour, Culpeper, for population size, and generally came in second place, until the past decade anyway. Even so, one would think that Henrietta was having its annual spring festival, or Founders Day had come early, or any number of localised events that drew in people from all over the state. Neither Maura or Orla were particularly new to high-density, high-traffic areas. Both had been to the capital. Both had been to places like New York City. And Seattle. And Sacramento. And Phoenix. And Chicago (sort of). Even so, after so many “quiet” years of living within the confines of Henrietta and only venturing East for supplies and contacts, Henrietta traffic proved to be quite astonishingly annoying. 

It didn’t help that the traffic was also panic-induced. Orla held the bat between her legs as she drove. She kept looking up at the sky intermittently, not out of anxiety, but out of anger, like it was the sky’s fault. Maura didn’t think whatever caused the world to fall into chaos was behind that low layer of clouds, but maybe she was wrong. 

“Looks like a lot of places are closing their doors,” she remarked, as she observed the ‘Closed’ signs over some of the local shops, and two of the bed and breakfasts. There was long car queues at several of the Shell gas stations and CVS and Family Dollar parking lots were packed. “

“I don’t think The Forum is going to be a safe place to go,” Orla pointed out. 

“Cassie?” Maura suggested. They had a mutual friend at the Food Lion who was known to help ferret clients their way. 

“She went on vacation with her family to their cabin. Besides, the Food Lion gives me the creeps, you know how I hate that place.”

Maura sighed. “Job?” Job Sturgeon was an optometrist who occasionally filled in at the Henrietta pharmacy; probably because his office was right next door anyway. Orla muttered something under her breath, smacked the steering wheel in frustration and shook her head. 

“Carla?”

Orla’s lime green fingernails did a wicked dance across the l. “Oooh, yeah. She’s at the shop.” This time, _she_ was the one who sighed. “The one near the Forum.” 

Maura sighed. “Well, we aren’t going to get there any faster by staying on Main.” At that, Orla took a sudden left. 

The Forum was a semi-upscale shopping center made up of old barns that used to be part of a massive grain mill. The largest barn, literally called ‘The Old Mill,’ had been turned into a grocery co-op, of which the ladies of 300 Fox Way were members. The only reason Maura hadn’t suggested to Blue that she work there was because Blue had made it clear she avoided the Forum. It was often filled with Aglionby boys and Aglionby cars. It was also often filled with a majority of Tea Party supporters, which had quickly made the place very uncomfortable for Blue and anyone she’d dare associate with. 

Beside the Forum, leading down a hidden away side street that one would miss if one didn’t know where to go, was a small neighbourhood of quaint, stylised rows of cottages. 

As Orla parked outside a decent-sized cabbage green cottage and reluctantly abandoned the bat in the driver’s seat, she looked around. “This neighbourhood seems quiet.” Outside of the sky groaning above, an ominous threat that seemed to be going nowhere yet, the neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet. It was supposed to have been a beautiful sunny day but aside from a stray cat darting across the street and scooting underneath a parked car, the neighbourhood was precisely good at seeming quiet. Orla made a noise and then went around the car towards the mailbox that belonged to the cabbage-green cottage. She flipped it open and rummaged through the mail. She glanced down at an envelope and sighed and handed the small stack to Maura. “You’re better at this than me.”

Maura, not particularly thrilled at rifling through someone else’s mail, reluctantly took the stack and shuffled.

“Two colours, four numbers?” she asked. Orla shrugged a ‘yes.’ Maura shuffled again and then stared down at the top most envelope - a power bill from the electric company. “Red. Blue. Seven. Two. Four. One.”

She and Orla met each other’s gaze. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we’re about to go inside.” Both women looked skyward in unison, then marched up the short, stone path to the wrap-around porch. The front lawn was very small but had been landscaped to look like a Chinese, or maybe Japanese, type garden, with some New Age influences. Random wildflowers popped up in between rock crevices and stones, acting like weeds. Maura did not call them weeds, even silently. Blue was always indignant when she heard people talk about weeds. 

They crossed the porch to the front door and rang the doorbell. 

Seven seconds later, Carla Kills-a-Hundred opened the door. “Orla! Maura!” Under normal circumstances, they would have embraced immediately but Carla, a woman with hair braided into a bun, a stern demeanor that rivalled granite, and a fire in her eyes, stood there, surveying her visitors. The skepticism soon turned to appraisal and she opened her arms. Orla allowed herself to be embraced with a smudged grimace, her mask sliding down her face, but Maura embraced back in full. Carla ushered them inside, locked the door, which did not go unnoticed by the Fox Way women. Henrietta was one of those small towns that was healthier than others in the sense that it had a consistent economy, a small but solid public school system, and a relatively low crime rate - all of this, probably, partially due to the existence of Aglionby Academy, but few people wanted to give _that_ school _all_ the credit. Locking one’s doors was always advisable, no matter where one went, but in Henrietta, if one managed to forget, chances were, nothing would happen. It was also not uncommon for people to leave their house doors unlocked while home. 

Inside, the home was mildly rustic, cozy, and with all the proper mess, like someone who’d lived in the house for several decades, like the house had been passed through generations. Carla’s husband, Stephen, the one with the infamous surname that earned them strange looks from white Henriettans since they were young, had died in a mining accident in Pennsylvania years ago, and their three children had long since moved out. Once a zookeeper in Richmond, Carla had always had a passion for carpentry, sculpting, and animals, but now, in her sixties, she had a passion for carpentry, sculpting, animals, _and_ magic and had set up two shops - one at the Forum and one inside her garage. She was a rather imposing woman; not in height but definitely in stature that had Persephone utterly convinced Carla was an elder goddess of some kind. For all they knew, Persephone had been onto something. “Water’s on the stove,” Carla said. Her sudden cheeriness clashed with her initial demeanor and the sky and the news. “Oh, do you have my mail?” She’d turned to Orla but Maura handed it to Carla instead, who snapped her fingers at her miss and added with a smile, “Darnit!“

The three women made their way to the back of the house, to sit within the den, which was more of a curtained solarium than anything else, perfumed by the vast variety of hanging plants, and standing plants, and shelftop plants. There was a large L-shaped sofa, a loveseat, and a rocking chair, schematically enhanced by the hanging paintings of landscapes done by one of Carla’s artistically-inclined children. A large wooden sculpture of a bear guarded a corner; wooden sculptures of ducks and geese littered bookshelves nailed into the walls. Outside, beyond the curtains, was a low-level deck that wasn’t particularly large, but sported a small table and a couple of chairs as well as a grill. Carla disappeared for a few moments and came back with a couple beers and handed them out. Orla folded herself brusquely upon the couch, while Maura took the loveseat and Carla plopped herself down heavily into the rocking chair, dragging a knitted blanket across her lap. Carla popped the can of her beer and took a swig. 

“You have power,” Orla said, uncustomarily stating the obvious. She took her mask off from around her head and shoved it into a tight back pocket of her embroidered capris. 

“For now,” Carla responded with a dry laugh. “It’s been flickerin’ for the last couple of hours. We’ve been lucky here though. I heard the ‘burbs are completely without power. The Flats, Redlands, I think, and even Molehill. Ya’ll out, too, I reckon?”

Maura nodded. Her mask hung around her neck. “You know the Southside is one of the last places on the grid to receive help. Listen, Carla, I think this is going to get a lot worse. Did you see the news earlier?”

Carla smacked her lips. “Yeah, just more lockdown nonsense. Didn’t see any reports about power outages though. Is this like last time?”

Maura and Orla exchanged a glance. “No,” said Maura slowly. “I… You’re… You didn’t see what happened on the television? The reports that came in about the death toll and D.C.?”

Carla set her beer down on the table beside her. Sensing the foreboding incredulity in Maura’s tone, she looked between the other two women and said, “I had the T.V. blaring all day since right before you both showed up. Knew I was to be expectin’ company, according to the cards. It was all the same ol’, same ol’ though; just lots of repeatin’ about lockdowns and military patrols. Same kinda stuff NPR was spewin’ all mornin’.”

“What about Fox? CNN?”

“Yeah, had CNN on for the last couple hours, I s’pose. Love that one news anchor with the pretty smile.”

“Anderson Cooper,” Orla supplied helpfully. 

“Yeah, him. _Wowee_.” She took another swig of her beer. “You both look like ya’ll seen a ghost or somethin’.”

Maura scooted forward on the loveseat, her hands clasped in front of her. “You didn’t hear screaming and go rushing to see what was on the news? No one has called you or talked to you about the reports?”

Carla shook her head. “Nah, it’s been kinda a quiet mornin’ outside whatever-the-gosh-darn-hell _that_ is.” She pointed upward, indicating the groaning sky. “Went down to Patterson’s to pick up some supplies. Everyone’s talkin’ about the sky and the power outages. So you say this _isn’t_ like the last time? The time when you said somethin’ was happenin’ to the ley lines?” Carla was about as schooled in magic as Maura was but she didn’t know about Ronan or the existence of dreamers. 

Maura exchanged another glance with Orla and then sighed. “I have a sort of contact in Washington—”

Carla raised an eyebrow. 

“Yeah,” Maura continued, guessing the unvoiced question. “My boyfriend knows someone. He was told from a reliable source that the news would falsely report on the death toll. Earlier, just before we came here, our television started to spazz…” and she told Carla what happened, with some detail help from Orla. When they were done, Carla set her beer down on the table and sat back into the rocking chair. For a moment, she looked like a stone carving. 

“Stephen would make better heads’n tails of this,” she said enigmatically. “He was real keen on getting straight to the facts, shootin’ through the magic of it all to the heart, y’know? I like lookin’ at the details too much.”

“Devil’s in the details,” said Orla. “Isn’t that the quote?”

Carla shrugged her broad shoulders and went to say something when—

_Clack!_

All three women jumped. 

Carla was the first to stand and go investigate. She came back with a small broom in her hands. “Groanin’ from the sky, vibrations or somethin’ musta knocked it over.” She met Maura’s eyes and Maura knew Carla didn’t believe in coincidences. But Carla set the broom against the wall beside the rocking chair and sat back down. All three women eyed the broom for several seconds. Orla needlessly wished she’d brought in the bat from the car. Maura sighed mentally at the thought of company. Carla broke the silence. 

“You know somethin’ else, though? Somethin’ strange?” She leaned forward. Orla uncrossed her own legs to lean in as well. “There was some howlin’ last night,” Carla said. “And into this morning. Dorris, down at Patterson’s, reckons wolves. But we haven’t had full-bred wolves in Virginia in, well, forever.”

“You sure they just weren’t coyotes? Or coywolves?” Orla asked. 

Carla laughed, but not unkindly. “Y’know the differences in sounds when y’hear ‘em! Wolves have deeper timbres, thicker, melancholic almost even in their joy. Coyotes reminds me of kids, yippin’ around. Been hearin’ a whole lot of them, too. Sometimes, even together, like they’re runnin’ together. Safety in numbers and kindness, I reckon. And you know that ‘coywolf’ is a misnomer, darlin.’”

Orla frowned. “Wait, it’s a what—?” 

Just then, however, the lights went out, like a candle being extinguished. The familiar hum of electricity was zapped from the house. A shiver circled the room like the warmth had been taken with the light. 

As if like an encore to the final movement of a symphony, the sky broke and rain fell from the heavens, a biblical deluge. Maura opened her mouth to say something but a shadow caught her eye. 

Carla jerked a thumb at the broom beside her and then pointed at the backyard and mouthed, _We’ve got company._

Maura met her gaze. _Good company?_

Carla shrugged. _The company we’ve been expectin.'_

Maura sighed. _Fair enough_. She stood up. 

The house, once vibrant with the glow of stained glass lamps, once alive with the soft sounds of the refrigerator and the central air conditioning and some commentary from some sixties show coming from the living room, was now filled with the tumult of the downpour. 

More shadows lurked, just beyond the curtains to the solarium. 

Carla didn’t move from her rocking chair. She seemed to be waiting for something. 

Orla was frozen, but not out of fear, just poised, _also_ waiting for something. She was wishing she had that bat. Hell, she would take the broom about now. The Gray Man had taught her how to snap thick pieces of wood over her knee; a broken broom would make a mighty fine weapon. 

The deck creaked. 

It was strangely bright inside the cottage, despite outside being gloomy, and in spite of the fact the power was out. It should have been much darker. Especially, given the light-blocking curtains that were drawn over most of the windows downstairs, save for the skylight above. 

Yes, it should have been _much_ darker inside. 

Maura settled upon the couch by the windows. 

“I wouldn’t open that,” began Carla. But Maura raised a hand. They grew quiet. 

Refusing to be undone by environmental phenomenon, Maura drew aside the curtain. The torrent pounded at the rooftop, against the glass, on the cedar siding. Normally, Maura, like many people, found rain comforting, lulling, a melody that rarely failed to calm her nerves. But this rain felt violent and aggressive in a way that rain, even when frought from a hurricane, generally did not. As she pulled aside the curtain, the roar of the storm grew until the rainfall sounded like thunder, the inside of universal clockwork. The glass was glowing; or rather, the rain streaks upon the glass were glowing faintly. 

Maura didn’t have to beckon Carla and Orla over. They knew something was unusual about this storm and knew that Maura had stumbled upon an aspect of that unusualness. The rainwater, sheeting down the glass, reminded Maura of space photography, the way enhanced areas seemed like light sources emanating from galaxies and nebulae. Through the rain streaks, she saw something moving on the deck and the deck creaked again. Maura pushed herself away from the glass and looked at Carla and said, 

“Are you ready for some extra weirdness today?”

Carla looked back, face bright. “Is this a magical sort of weirdness?”

Maura looked at Orla, who only nodded. “Yeah, this is definitely a magical sort of weirdness.” She lifted herself off the couch. “We have to push everything against the wall. How do you feel about this carpet?”

“Personally? Or aesthetically?”

“Would you mind it getting wet and muddy?”

Carla shrugged. “Not so worried ‘bout the carpet, no. But I’d be right worried about the furniture. I’ll go get some tarp.” 

She disappeared and came back with some dusty plastic tarp she’d fished out from her carpentry shop in the garage. She covered the couches and chairs as Orla moved plants back against walls and windows, and Maura adjusted floor lamps and end tables. Fragile decorative pieces were moved to shelves above the height of Maura’s waist. She noticed Carla’s and Orla’s bare feet. “We should put on shoes.”

Now Orla shot her a questioning look. 

“Not just sandals or open-toed _whatevers_ either,” Maura added. “Boots. Carla, do you have three pairs of boots?”

Carla grinned. “‘Course I do!”

Then she disappeared for a second time, taking only minutes longer, before returning with three mud-dried construction boots. Orla sighed as she slipped her lime green toes into the shoe. “Are we going hiking?” 

“No, it’s to prevent damage being done to our feet should we get stepped on by several 180-pound animals.”

When Orla was fully situated into boots that clashed with her entire outfit, she finally reached for the broom and held it like a spear. 

Maura then grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella stand located near the solarium exit, opened the door, and carefully slid out. The storm roared in her ears, and she feared that the rain would pummel its way right through the fabric of the umbrella. It fell heavier than what she was used to. And though the sky was darker than before, the world felt oddly illuminated, silvery cascades shedding shafts of light through canopies of the forest in the backyard. The phosphorescent quality made Maura uneasy, but it wasn’t the rain she considered magical. The rain felt wrong. 

What felt magical, or maybe _surreal_ was a better term, was the fact that the entire deck was covered, shoulder-to-shoulder, in wolves and big cats. When she stepped out amongst them, they didn’t flinch away, but instead crowded closer to her, pressing their rain-soaked fur into her thin frame. Their behaviour strangely docile, like housepets, the animals were nervous, upset at something and that something, Maura guessed, was the rain. But instead of hiding out in the forests, they’d come here, to this very house, hoping to find some shelter, and Maura had no idea how they would’ve known that she would be the one to provide it. She opened the door again, and stepped back into the solarium. The dogs and cats hesitated at first, but with her urging, they herded themselves through the door, strangely polite and patient with one another despite their obvious _im_ patience to vacate the rain. The rain had struck some of Maura’s exposed skin and she recoiled when it touched her. It felt toxic, heavy as it had sounded, _wrong_. _She_ was more impatient than the animals, more than grateful to be back inside, closing the umbrella hurriedly, but unwilling to put it back in the umbrella stand. It needed to be washed thoroughly, cleansed, _something_. 

“Oh, _shit_ —” Orla gasped, leaping back up on the tarp-covered sofa, the broom dropping to the plastic-covered cushions beside her. In came a dozen dogs - coyotes, probably, Maura didn’t know, and actual wolves, which she didn’t think had officially returned to Virginia, along with more than a dozen of their feline counterparts - bobcats, panthers, some housecats small and huddled beneath their larger relatives. They moved quietly and quickly, stepping carefully onto the carpet with muddied paws, whimpering softly to one another, and pressing into Maura and Carla when they could. Carla’s entire solarium was filled with a pack and a colony and Maura could see that Carla was in awe. The whole room was awed. 

A dog, or a wolf, licked at Maura’s hand and Maura, out of habit, scratched the animal behind a damp ear. She cringed when the dampness touched her skin, but she bore the burden for the sake of comforting the wild beast before her. Wary, tails tucked, ears pricked, the animals gave their human companions entreating, imploring glances, but averted most of their attention to the windows and the ominous rain that streaked them. They hated the rain as much as Maura did and it was in their own apprehension and distrust that Maura realised how _much_ she hated the rain; it wasn’t just a toxin pouring from the sky and it wasn’t just another form of malevolence; it was a combination of both that came with surety and entitlement, a rain that seemed utterly alien, a rain that said _this is my home now_. A harbinger to death. Maura signaled something to Orla and she closed the curtains. The wolves and wild cats only relaxed a fraction; they were still uneasy about the rain within their fur and how Maura knew this, she wasn’t sure. It was a vibe, like when you walk into a room and you know people have been talking about you, but they’re trying hard to cover up this fact, so there’s that tonal shift and peripheral glances. But you _know_. 

Maura waded through the crowd of animals till she came to where Carla was standing. 

“So,” she said. “You didn’t replace the jacuzzi tub yet, did you?” 

One by one, Maura led a wolf, or a coyote, or a cat, to the slate-floored bathroom Carla and her husband had redone years ago. Candles were lit and placed safely on shelves out of reach of the animals. Two oil lamps were nudged into the corners of the vanity, others hung from hooks in the ceiling. It was a strangely romantic setting for an apocalypse. 

Cats tended to hate water, but they must have hated the rain more because each animal obediently stepped into the tub and stood there, patiently, as Maura and Carla scrubbed them down. After watching Maura do this a few times, Orla found that she couldn’t resist either. Her fingers grazed over freshly cleansed, dampened fur, and her face was lit with a magical awe. In spite of herself, maybe Orla was also finding kinship with these animals. Humans domesticated dogs and had feline companions for thousands of years. And right now, these animals were relying on that bond to be free of the toxicity that mattered their furs and itched at their skin. A musk more rank than _wet animal_ had filled the air. 

“Their fur is so thick,” she said, surprising herself. “I feel like there’s just more fur beneath all of this fur.”

Maura smiled at her. 

Orla gently washed away the rain from the muzzle of a reddish looking wolf and the wolf licked at her face. She yanked her head away in surprise. 

Maura and Carla laughed. “Careful,” warned Carla with a grin. “They’ll try to lick the insides of your mouth!”

“What, _why_ —” 

“It’s a number of things: a greetin’, affection, submission—” 

Orla scowled. “Thanks for the heads up.” But she went back to scrubbing the rain from the wolves. She was hesitant when she came to a bobcat. “I always thought these animals were bigger.”

Carla laughed again. “They don’ really need to be. You see their feet?”

“Huge,” Orla said. The bobcat’s paws were almost as large as her head.

“It’s very strange seein’ them all together like this. Coyotes and dogs take down bobcats. This species is ‘bout, oh, I dunno, almost two million years old. That one—” she pointed to a large gray wolf, “ —is probably a little over a million years old. Dogs, though, are only in the thousands of years old. Gotta lot of history standin’ right here. Shy animals, all of ‘em, ‘cept some domesticated dogs’n cats. Lettin’ themselves be herded into a small house, which must seem a bit like a cage or maybe they see it like a den, I dunno. But they’re trustin’ us. Wolves know we’re predators, too, for the most part.”

“That means the rain is scarier to them than us,” Maura concluded, wiping toxic wetness from a coyote’s muzzle. It nuzzled her hand when she stopped for a moment. 

“Some of these animals don’t even have habitats near Virginia,” Carla said, marvelling. “Makes me wonder why they travelled this far to get _here_.” 

Maura didn’t say anything out loud but as she switched over to washing a Canadian lynx, she felt it had something to do with her. Maybe Orla and Carla, too. Maybe even _Blue_. Maura wished beyond wishes, just then, that Persephone was there, that Persephone was seeing this, that Persephone would say something enigmatic but _true_. The rain wasn’t just toxic, it was evil. Maura couldn’t explain why she hated it so much and she wanted to ask Orla and Carla about it. But she wasn’t sure if she had the words to illustrate just how deep her hatred ran. Persephone would know. Calla, too. 

No one knew how much time passed but it was most likely several hours. Maura’s hands and shoulders were sore by the end of it. Orla’s nail polish was chipped, her fingertips pruned up. Carla made some sort of joke about her scoliosis. Slowly, the musk of the rain dissipated beneath the scents of dish soap and shampoo. Eventually, the three women changed out of their wet dirty clothes and into dry ones Carla offered. They sat on the tarp-covered sofa as Maura opened up a mango. 

Though visibly more relaxed than they’d been all afternoon, the great animals were greatly disinclined to go back outside. The three women stared at the rain as it thrust itself at the windows like it was trying to get in at them. 

“How long do you think it’ll last?” Orla asked. 

“Enough to cause several floods,” Carla mused. “I should ch—”

“I wouldn’t leave the house,” Maura interrupted. When Carla looked at her, she saw a shiver of recognition and nodded. 

“You’re probably right. But oh, I do worry ‘bout the other folk in this neighbourhood. Not everyone is as sprightly, if y’know what I mean.” 

_If you leave the house, you will die_ , came the unbidden thought. Maura caught Orla staring at her and knew that Orla _knew_ , too. 

Then Orla gasped. 

The mango Maura had opened didn’t have one usual seed, but a couple dozen small ones. 

“What the _hell_?” 

She hurried to gather them all, counting them as she did, sliding them to one side of the plate. 

“Where did you get this?” Maura asked. 

Carla, nonplussed, just shrugged. “Just the co-op! I have a whole bunch of mangos —”

“Twenty-seven,” Maura said. “Twenty-seven seeds.” She stood up suddenly. 

“What does that mean?” Carla asked. 

“It means that our humanity is needed elsewhere,” Maura said. “It normally refers to acts and deeds over a lifetime but this time, it answered the question in my head.”

“We should probably head back then,” Orla said, because the question had been in her mind, too. “We’re staying out in Singers Falls, just south of Ashbys Corner. I think—”

“We’re going to ask around town,” Maura filled in. She still couldn’t get over the fact that she had just give baths to real, wild wolves and bobcats. Blue was going to be so jealous. A beautiful, though worrisome, adventure it had been. “See if anyone knows anything more.”

Carla smiled a sad smile. “Looks like you both knew more’n me.”

“Perks of being the only group of psychics in town, huh?” Maura wasn’t a fan of good-byes, but honestly, who really was? “Well, I think you’ll be protected as long as you have them for company.” The whole house stank of wet animal but at least it was _clean_ wet animal and not the musky scent of the rain from earlier. 

“We’ll call you when we get to safety,” Maura said. Then added, “If there’s electricity.”

“Ohhh, no worries,” Carla said fondly, after they hugged. “I know you’ll send a sign my way. Don’t forget to move carefully.” This last sentiment was said with emphasis. 

Maura and Orla were decked out in heavy rain gear, raincoats, boots, gloves, and full-sized welding masks that covered their faces. 

“I feel like this is one step away from Hazmat,” Orla complained as she and Maura made their way back to Ronan’s BMW. The rain felt like small BB bullets against the fabric of their gear, angry, petulant, determined to find a way through, to break skin. But the clothes did their jobs and when Maura and Orla entered the car, they felt breathed out in a surge of relief. Orla eyed the plastic bag holding their damp, animal-smelling clothing and sighed. Carla wasn't incapable of being fashionable; the style Orla now donned looked great on her but it wasn't _her_. It was alien clothing beneath alien clothing. 

The car started and they drove away from the little alcove of a neighbourhood and back onto the main drag. 

“Should we really leave them behind?” Orla asked, as if she both wondered how they’d transport all the wolves and cats and if she hoped the answer would be a solid ‘yes.’ Thankfully, divination wasn’t required to foretell Maura’s very solid nod of her head. 

“Twenty-seven?” Orla asked. 

Maura nodded. Sighed. “Twenty-seven seeds.”

“In a _mango_ of all things.”

They got into the car. Orla took the bat and placed it between her knees. On the dashboard was the timer Blue had given Orla. Its screen was blank but neither woman noticed. Traffic had dispersed significantly since the drive to Carla’s and Maura had no trouble keeping to the speed limit as she went down Main. She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Orla’s eyes meet her gaze. Orla fished around in the glove compartment before withdrawing a battered deck of playing cards. 

“No twenty-sevens in here,” she said, but it was a hollow sentiment. “How many?”

“Two.”

Orla slid the deck out of its sheath and shuffled. She tapped the deck to Maura’s head and with her eyes closed, withdrew two random cards from the pile. She flipped the top most over. 

“Four of clubs,” she stated. 

Maura suddenly pulled onto a side street and turned around. Orla glanced out the window at the electrical wires. The transformer sparked and then Maura was back on Main. “Just as we’d supposed,” Maura said. The four of clubs indicated responsibility, which meant, in response to Maura’s silent question, that there was still work for them to do. 

“The second card?”

The car radio hummed to life, but it was just static. 

“ _Shit_.”

Maura glanced at the card in Orla’s hand: the second Joker. 

“No,” Maura said. “No, not _that_. I’ll ask again.” She rephrased her question and Orla shuffled the card back into the deck and withdrew another. 

It was the second Joker. 

“No!” Maura slammed her hands on the steering wheel. It had been a good long while since Orla had seen Maura lose her cool. “ _Again_!” 

Orla shuffled and withdrew a card. 

The second Joker. 

“You do it.”

“I don’t think—”

“Please.”

Orla drew in a sharp breath, replaced the Joker card, shuffled, tapped the deck to her forehead, and withdrew a card. 

The second Joker. 

Maura jerked the car over to a parking space on the side of the street. The deck slipped from Orla’s hands and both women stared as the cards fluttered across Orla’s lap and onto the floor. 

Every card was the second Joker. 

Orla slowly began gathering them up. 

_Joker, Joker, Joker_. 

Then she rolled down the window as quickly as she could to avoid the rain and tossed the deck outside, where the cards were picked up in an unseen and unfelt wind and turned to small asymmetrical rats made mostly of eyeballs and teeth. They scurred away into crevices that hadn’t existed before. 

“Sorry for littering,” Orla said. She had not noticed the rats. 

“If you hadn’t done it, I would have,” Maura responded. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Orla didn’t ask what the question was; she could guess it anyway, it and its numerous iterations. Orla looked out the window. Main Street, like most Main Streets across America, was littered with convenience stores and corner stores, body shops, nail salons, boutiques and restaurants. 

“Information?” Orla queried. 

“And free drinks,” Maura added, giving Orla a knowing look. Orla merely grinned. Maura forcibly unclenched her jaw and unclenched her fingers from around the steering wheel and forced herself to get out of the car and duck quickly beneath an umbrella. _Responsibility_. Orla handed Maura her mask and both women slipped on their gear, tightened loose strings, zipped up unzipped zippers, before they vacated the car and dashed for the pub entrance. They swung open the heavy oak door to _Moonshadow Brew_ , one of Henrietta’s local pubs with mediocre ratings and a sense of style that could have been trying for American Outback, Australian Outback, or something kinda Irish. The door chimed as they entered. 

Maura and Orla were surprised and unsurprised to see that the pub was busy. They were also surprised and unsurprised that the mood in the pub was _not_ the sloppy drunken stupor of satisfying alcohol and decent fried food. Several faces turned towards them as the two women approached the bar. Not everyone was wearing masks. Neither was the bartender who came down to take their orders. His name was Billy. A mirror filled up the entire wall behind the bar and Maura eyed it as she undid her mask. Her expression reflected back at her was perfectly unreadable. She smiled at herself and that was perfectly unreadable, too. 

It wasn’t long before Orla had squeezed them into the hub of conversation, the topic of the millennium being, of course, the impending _apocalypse_. She’d removed her mask, too. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Her brightly coloured nails, still thoroughly chipped, matched her brightly coloured eyeshadow, which did _not_ match the darkly coloured attitude of the people in the pub, but they treated her like she’d been there all along, like she was family. 

_Subversion_ , Orla had always said, _is the key to success_. Or, rather, ‘success’ meant ‘getting what you want,’ regardless of circumstances, and usually, regardless of consequences. Maura sat on a barstool as Orla lounged in a chair. The stories started off tepid and timid: power kept flickering, explosions could be heard, traffic was abysmal, cars behaved oddly, there were shadows in the woods, people seemed to disappear. Quarantine zones had been set up. There were further calls for masks and social distancing. Others talked about vaccinations and others still said vaccinations were a bad idea because of Big Pharma and something to do with Bill Gates putting RFID chips in them. As if most people didn’t own some version of a smartphone these days anyway. Maura had to admire Orla’s swimming patience. She navigated bullshit like she was doused in bullshitphobic material. She could encounter it, entertain it, and let it slide right off her without even the smallest pieces finding homes in nooks and crannies of her clothes. She smiled, lightly tapped a hand on the back of his hand, engaged with bright white teeth, and pouty sympathy. Blue would have made a Gansey comparison. Orla would have made an _Orla_ comparison. 

Both would be accurate.

But Orla would hate the former. 

The stories gradually shifted to temporal. The sky was a big topic. Even the most oblivious citizen had noticed that, perhaps, the sun had disappeared. The air felt stale. Luisa Cunningham, who ran Prime Nails down the street, talked about how her animals were behaving funny. She normally kept her dog outside while she was at work (don’t worry, she had hurried to reassure them, she had built a luxurious kennel for the pup outside and the landscape was perfectly dog friendly) because her rat terrier-chihuahua mix often tore up her living room when she wasn’t home. But he wouldn’t go outside. He cried in such a way when she tried to get him outside that she couldn’t bear to carry him outside. She left to go get groceries and had come back, hours upon hours later, and he was curled up tightly in a corner. When she walked through the door, he had come running up to her and had pressed himself into her leg. He hadn’t been the excited, happy pup she was used to but rather a scared, anxious animal. Mr. Harrington had said that he had tried to mow his lawn but the lawn mower spun out of control and began attacking his fence. Mrs. Calhoun, who’d taught elementary school, had come home to grade student assignments that had been dropped off, and every single one was covered in numbers written in childish penmanship. She had reached out to parents and those who had answered the phone had simply stated that they hadn’t dropped off their children’s schoolwork for the week yet because of everything else that was happening. But there is, Mrs. Calhoun had insisted, a stack of paperwork, division worksheets, multiplication tables, common core packets, all labelled with each child’s name from her second grade class, all covered, back to front, in numbers. 

Orla navigated these stories with profound ease. Despite Henrietta being a majority white, rural town, she quashed their xenophobia with a prowess only she could muster. Maura, who was more stoic, who sort of despised most pleasantries, who was loud with her family and observant but practical with everyone else, had never figured out all of the social intricacies of engaging with strangers outside of what was needed for business. She’d had her moments when she was younger, following bands across country, travelling to some inn in Minnesota because she’d read an article in _National Geographic_ and knew she had no choice but to do _just that_ , taking courses at a university in Manchester, England, accepting drunken offers for dances at taverns in Dublin, Ireland. Maura wasn’t stiff and _reserved_ was too strict of a word she’d use for herself, but perhaps she was simply _picky_ . She was good at being clever and she was good at distrusting people without appearing to be distrustful, but she latched on to _authenticity_ , and she knew just how authentic most people were when they were not tucked away in the privacy of their own homes. It wasn’t that Maura was insecure or lacked any confidence. In fact, she was appropriately confident, perhaps bordering on the side of “too much.” It was a confidence she’d bore throughout most of her adulthood, a badge of honour she’d won in an incident with a fallen tree and a barn roof, an incident that had culminated in broken collarbones and ribs and laughter that hurt. Orla, however, had been her way since Maura could remember. She came alive with the attention. She enjoyed the game of social interaction. Maura, who wasn’t too fond of sacrificing her views for diplomacy, watched and took pleasure in how Orla turned people’s opinions against them with the most charming smile. 

Honestly, it was effervescent. 

Subversive. 

So, the stories shifted into hotter territory as people left and the hour (or hours?) dragged on, as alcohol settled in their veins and made vision fuzzy and lowered inhibitions.

And the rain. 

_Everyone hated the rain._

The rest of the stories varied from truth to falsity to outrageous but one thing was agreed upon: the rain was the worst. 

It was then that the divides became more noticeable and Maura remembered the Joker cards. She sipped her ale. There was a small group of people who listened to all of these stories, and shared a couple of their own, with a passive interest; they’d known all along the end of times would come. The signs had been there for forever, they said. The de-evolution of America made sure of that. There was another group that sneered and disdained this. Maura wasn’t pleased with their handling of the devout, but she agreed with their aggression to an extent: it came with a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency Maura had felt since she’d left the Barns, maybe before, maybe months ago when the first announcements were made. Maybe even before then. But over time, the urgency just built and built and built and built. _Don’t forget to move carefully_. ‘Careful’ wasn’t necessarily synonymous with ‘slowly,’ was it? Maura wasn’t particularly good at moving slowly. But she _could_ be careful. 

Careful and responsible. 

She sipped her ale again. 

The stories were becoming scorching in their specificity. A cousin had claimed to have seen a man’s head get cleaved in half from a neighbour who’d been foaming at the mouth. Someone else had seen a cow eat another cow. Another mentioned how she’d poured herself a bowl of cereal for breakfast that very morning and the cornflakes had turned into black beetles. Another said an entire room was missing from his house; it hadn’t been demolished, it simply stopped existing. There was no door. Just a wall. Another said he’d seen neighbours, a family of five, two parents and three kids, being lifted into the sky and consumed by the clouds. Another had woken up to her husband trying to stab her eyes out with hypodermic needles. Another, who’d spent thousands of dollars landscaping his yard, had come outside to grab the paper, only to see that his entire front yard looked like a burial ground. Another had watched a row of wind turbines collapse like dominos in the distance. Another said every book in her library had had the words wiped from the pages. Birds crashed into windows. Airplanes fell out of the sky. Cars had tempers. Trees warped and bore odd fruit. Symphonies of eerie sounds invaded people’s lives. Shapes moved just out of peripheral vision. 

It was getting hard for some to tell the difference between nightmare and reality. 

The longer they spoke, the more Maura appreciated the spirituality of the religious, even if they got the pantheon wrong, and the more she appreciated the non-religious, even if their minds weren’t quite open to all the other possibilities. 

“Orla?” came a voice cutting through the din. 

Orla turned. Coming down the aisle between the tables was a super lanky, thin, white boy with a long face and sharp cheekbones and dull, chestnut hair that had been carelessly swept to the side. Orla stood up the moment she saw who it was and they embraced. Maura raised an eyebrow, which Orla must have heard because she turned and gave Maura a look that said _this one is okay_. Maura didn’t always understand Orla’s taste in men, but her taste in women was impeccable. 

“Louis, Louis, Louis,” she crooned. “What are you doing here?” She asked the question like an accusation. Maura had to admit that Louis was good about it though because he knew not to be offended. 

“Was helping my uncle,” he said, nodding at Billy the Bartender. He must have felt Maura’s gaze and reached a hand out. 

“You must be the famous Maura Sargent!”

Maura glanced at Orla, who raised an eyebrow, too, and made a batting motion with her arms, indicating this one _had hit a homerun_. A little off-put that this boy knew her full name and she had never heard of him in her entire life, she shook his hand.

“Heard wonderful things about you,” Louis said, his letters neatly rounded off in a way that reminded Maura of the Shenandoah Valley without being unspeakably hillbilly. 

“Well, that’s a lie.”

Louis grinned a smile that seemed much too big for his face. “Only partially, ma’am. Still pleased to make your acquaintance. So, what can I get you ladies?”

Maura sipped her ale. Orla put a hand on Louis’s bony wrist. 

“Actually,” she said, very quickly, very smoothly, very slyly, “Louis, you remember my...abilities, right?”

His eyes went wide. 

“No, no,” Orla continued hastily, “not _those_ abilities. My other ones.”

Louis laughed a little, ran a thin, elegant hand through his hair, which demonstrated exactly why it looked as carelessly windswept as it did. “Oh, yes, Orla, the uncanny ones.” He said _uncanny_ like a term of endearment. Maura found herself warming to him. 

Orla’s eyes glittered and she took both of his hands in hers. “You need to go home, grab Josefina and Daria, and head west for about… fifty miles? Maybe more. Stay close to forests, specifically ones made of oak. Chestnut or red, doesn’t matter.”

Louis, astoundingly, didn’t look surprised at all. He soaked in her words like this was something he knew would come. “Do I have time to show you ladies something?”

“I guess while time is relevant,” Maura said, thinking of the Joker cards. She drained the glass and thought for a second that she saw shadows in the mirror. 

But she blinked and they were gone. She stared at the mirror for a good five seconds, just checking, just checking to make _sure_ … 

The mirror remained accurate, doing its job of reflecting the scenery back at the pub goers and making the room look bigger than it actually was. 

She followed Orla past the buzzing tables and around the far end of the bar, through some swinging doors. They strode through the kitchen, a couple of cooks pausing to eye them as they passed. Orla bared her teeth and one made an audible _oh_ sound before going back to work. Beyond the kitchen was a storeroom and attached to that was a small, high-ceiling room meant for loading and unloading goods. Maura had forgotten about the _Moonshadow_ ’s contracts with Henrietta farmers, which was surprising, considering all the _support your local farmers!_ signs plastered in the front windows. She thought about Ronan. 

The loading bay was vacant. The gate was shut, but there was still a small line of light between the bottom of the door and the ground. Rain lashed violently against the metal, sounding like the claws of a million animals trying to get in, trying to get in and consume everyone and everything inside. Maura felt, just then, that the rain may have increased in its tumult as a personal vendetta against _her_ _and Orla_ specifically. It hated them. It hated them so very much. 

Orla grabbed Maura’s shoulder. 

“Did you see it?” she asked quietly, as Louis began moving metal racks aside. 

“See what?”

“The food in the kitchen.”

Maura shook her head. “Steaks and fries?”

“Body parts. Dead...birds…” 

Maura felt something cold shiver through her. She had a good fifteen or so years of life on Orla and thus had a good fifteen years or so of more experience with the supernatural and yet, she felt that the last few years amounted to more knowledge about such things than her entire life’s experience. Neeve would be having a field day right now. 

“And the shadows in the mirror?” she asked. Orla shook her head, opened her mouth to say something when Louis’s voice rang out across the bay, 

“All right, ladies, I wanted ta show ya this. If you can keep these sorta things a secret for now; I reckon a panic wouldn’t be quite sensible. I’m warnin’ you, too, and this is gonna be quite a bit of grotesquery. You ready for that?”

With determined nods, Maura and Orla carefully made their way over to the nook in the wall. A huge basin of a sink was stuck to the wall but it looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. Even with all her years of experience, Maura could not be prepared for what it was she saw. Neither of the women shied away. They allowed themselves to take it in. They allowed themselves to feel everything that came with seeing such a thing: 

It was a carcass. 

Or a corpse. 

Or a bunch of carcasses and corpses. 

It looked as though someone had killed a human and sliced it open and spread its skin across the wall. It looked as though someone had taken a dog, a cat, a deer, a lamb… and did the same thing, melding parts of dead animal with parts of dead human. The organs hadn’t been fully removed and they weren’t well preserved. The intestines hung grotesquely down the wall, dropping into the sank. A liver had been sliced into. A lung was missing, and the other looked decayed. No, _rotted_. 

Black vines curled in and out of the rotted organs, punctured holes in the skin, cracked the wall. Malignant looking flowers with tumourous buds sprouted from the vines. The blood and organ tissue still gleamed, as though it was fresh. 

The worst part, however, was the head. 

The head looked as though it may have belonged to a child at one point. What remained was just enough of a child to cause Orla and Maura to both feel waves of nausea, but they didn’t turn away. Orla had a hand over her mouth in horror. 

A child’s head, partially smashed in, with bits of brain glistening beneath the alien flora, eyes sunken and lit like a jack-o-Lantern, jaw unhinged and hanging wide open in a perpetual scream. There were strange gashes across the neck and shoulders, stitched up haphazardly with thread material that looked like vines. It didn’t look real. It couldn’t have been real. 

“Who...who would…” Orla started after she found her voice. 

“That’s...that’s not a who,” Louis said quietly. “That’s a _what_.” As he spoke, flies buzzed around the jaw and the lolling purple tongue. The jaw looked much too big to have belonged to the child originally. It was like whoever — _whatever_ — created this devilish shrine had done so by piecing together parts from everything it could fathom that made up the world. Maura felt that the world had drifted into some form of eternal night. Orla finally glanced away. 

“A…” Louis began, unsure of how to proceed; he was clearly rattled, too, even though this wasn’t the first time he’d seen the monster. “A… a thing I wanted to show you was…” He swallowed, “...was all the--the little mushrooms, I think they’re called, in the, in the, uh… Well. They’re in...it.”

There it was again: that feeling of urgency. Louis hadn’t shown them this horrid truth to shock, to cause nightmares. He’d trusted them with this truth because he had sensed the urgency of the world and the only people he could think of who’d be equipped to deal with such other-horrors, people he knew in person, would be the psychic woman he’d dated and her psychic family. Maura and Orla exchanged a wary look and then Maura turned back to the horror plastered to the wall. Louis had procured a long, metal rod, and he was using it to point at several parts of the atrocity, a leg that could have been either human or animal, a finger, the jaw. He handed Maura his phone with the flashlight turned on. Maura clambered unsteadily onto the crates next to the sink, not wanting to get any closer than she absolutely had to, so she made sure to keep her face a good foot or so back, and saw what it was Louis had noticed: tiny mushrooms, the largest no bigger than the pad of her thumb, the smallest (that she could discern with the naked eye) as small as a needle. The mushrooms visibly shied away from the light and the rain against the bay door seemed to increase in anger, as though she, Maura, had personally offended the storm. 

“I would step back quickly now, ma’am,” Louis said and Maura leapt off the crates before he had finished his sentence. “Earlier, when we first noticed this, uh, here creature, Doctor George, you know him, yeah? The optometrist over at Best Yes? He took a pocket knife and cut into one of the larger mushrooms and a big cloud erupted from it.”

“Spores,” Orla supplied, angry and haunted. 

“Yes’m.” Louis sounded defeated. “Then Doc George, he… He got all funny and blood began to ooze from his… his pores and we tried to get medical help but the power was cutting off and on and then he went out in the rain, back there. We hadn’t seen him since and no one can get a hold of him.”

“You let me get close to this thing after you’d witnessed _that_?” Maura demanded. 

“It only happens if you cut the mushrooms, ma’am,” Louis said. “You were safe from all that, trust me, I poked at it for about an hour.”

“You _poked_ at _that_? You could have died!” 

Louis bowed his head. “Yes’m. But I ain’t afraid of death, ma’am.”

“He really isn’t,” Orla agreed, seeing the expression on Maura’s face. 

“I wanted you to see the...them… because,” Louis continued, agitated, worried, “because I think our planet is being changed.”

“Changed how?” Orla asked. But she knew. Maura knew she knew. 

“I think the word is _terraformed_ ,” she said. She felt cold inside and didn’t even realise she was moving until they reached the loading bay door that led into the storeroom and left the horror behind, hidden neatly behind several metal racks that Louis moved into place. “Our world is being terraformed.”

“We’re being invaded.” They walked through the kitchen, Orla in the lead, and entered the dining hall. She turned to face Louis. “You need to leave.”

Louis nodded hurriedly, as he gathered his jacket and umbrella. “Grab my cat and sister, head west for fifty miles. Stay close to trees.”

“Do sixty miles, just to be safer,” Orla added. She had started to sweat. The dining hall felt unnaturally warm. “Try not to get wet.”

They embraced. Maura didn’t understand Orla’s relationships but she didn’t care to pretend to. Louis saluted Maura. “It was a pleasure to finally meet you, ma’am. Hope you and your kin can stay safe.” To Orla, “I don’t know what you ladies can do about this but I had to tell you. Somethin’ told me to tell you.” Orla, hiding the fact that she was undone inside, just nodded and blinked rapidly, and pointed to the door at the front of the restaurant. 

“Get outta here, Louis.”

After the bells jingled, indicating his departure, Maura and Orla stood at the bar, looking and not looking at each other at the same time. 

“Do you think this has to do with Dream Boy?”

Maura sighed, rapped a knuckle on the bar for a drink, and said, “Unfortunately, I think all of this is more our area than _not_. So, yes, probably.”

She and Orla surveyed the way the rain lashed against the front windows, the windows decorated with posters and menus and chalk marker drawings. Maura was shaken by the conviction that something lurked beyond the mists of the frosted glass, a hostile presence that wanted to reach inside and grab her, grab Orla, grab everything that tied them together, and eviscerate them from head to groin, obliterate them into a thousand pieces where they stood. The feeling was so intense and so specific that Maura grabbed for Orla’s hand and found that Orla had simultaneously grabbed for hers. The groaning of the sky was more ominous, clear, as if whatever caused it had decided to bow down over the pub itself. Maura picked up her ale. 

“ _Maura_.” Urgency. 

Orla lifted something from the bottom of Maura’s glass. 

The second Joker. 

“Shit.”

“How the hell did that get here?” Orla said. She was unravelling again. “How the _fuck_ did that get there?!” Maura tore the card down the middle, stacked the two halfs and tore horizontally. She dropped the remaining pieces into an abandoned cup glass of clear liquid, water, maybe, or vodka. Orla waved a hand, too, a menial gesture, flick of the wrist. 

“Ley lines?” Orla suggested, suddenly much calmer sounding than moments earlier. “The Lynch kid? The electricity outages again, like last time? That all feels like their strange forest friend. I’d really like to _not_ be possessed again.”

“Cabeswater,” Maura mused in an amused tone. She was trying not to let the Joker’s reappearance shake her resolve, but, honestly, the child’s head and the vengeance of the rain outside just added to the mental fog she was fighting to clear through. She had _responsibilities_ . “So, somehow, this virus is like _that_ , or _comes_ from that.”

“And right now, Dreamer Boy can’t dream.” Orla smacked her lips obnoxiously. 

“No, I think he _can_ dream.” Maura was thoughtful. “I think he’s afraid to.”

“Loser,” Orla said. “Does he have a good reason to be afraid?”

The sky groaned loudly at that. Several pairs of eyes looked towards the ceiling. 

“I think Mr. Lynch knows enough about his dream world to be able to decide whether or not to be adequately afraid of it.”

Orla snorted. “You could’ve just said _yes_.”

Maura rolled her eyes, but a tense smile ghosted her lips. “ _Yes_.” Under normal circumstances, she probably would have brought up Louis and teased Orla about him. But these were not normal circumstances so she just added, “how many of those stories we heard earlier do you think were true?”

Orla shrugged. “All of them. Maybe slightly exaggerated but the cores were true. I’m not looking forward to seeing people being cleaved in half or cattle turning cannibalistic or whatever. They all go in line with what we saw on the news stations. Blondie with the blood tears and Coca Cola boy talking through that silver-haired fox.”

“Adam Parrish,” Maura said, and the moment she said it, the pub grew quiet. The chatter didn’t stop but it was like a hush had fallen over the clientele, like someone had stuffed earmuffs over her ears. All she heard, as clear as day, was the rain beating at the windows, angry, desperate to get in and consume everyone. 

“Our apocalypse didn’t like the sound of _that_.”

Maura glanced warily at the windows. “Of course it didn’t. Because, in order to save the world, Adam Parrish must die.”

◈ ◈ ◈

Thayer, Harvard Campus, Cambridge, MA [ 01:27:33 PM, or perhaps 4:07:09 PM]

Adam came out of the trance, half-dead. 

It took the hammering of footfalls outside his dorm room door to bring back the other half of him that was still lost within the space between here and _there_. He was still trapped and his stomach lurched at this thought for it had only been a few seconds, a couple minutes maybe, since he’d gone still. He’d pushed every large piece of furniture he could move against the door while silently apologising to his dorm mate who hadn’t shown up yet anyway. He’d grabbed his bowl, one that served simultaneously as decoration, storage, and as his key to the worlds between here and there. He sat and tried to block out the barrelling of the tanks outside Thayer, tried to block out what sounded like an explosion, tried to block out screams. The chaotic bursts weren’t consistent and right when it was quiet for too long, something else outside would happen. 

Terror had leeched itself onto his veins but he knew, for the time being, that staying inside was better than going out into that fray. Thayer didn’t come with exterior hiding places. The bushes were kept low, the courtyard was wide open, the trees narrow. But he also knew that he didn’t have long to stay. The soldiers outside did not seem to be taking survivors. It didn’t matter that these were wealthy sons and daughters of politicians, diplomats, CEOs. Class meant nothing in the face of a wicked pandemic. Adam had briefly wondered if Gansey and his family were locked away in some political bunker somewhere. Were such things afforded to all members of Congress or just the super high-up ones? Did Gansey’s family have that kind of paranoia-accompanied wealth to even _have_ a bunker? Adam didn’t think Mr. and Mrs. Gansey did, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the grandparents did. 

He was still panting slightly from the scry - this one had taken a lot out of him. He’d never meant to possess someone, let alone _Anderson Cooper_ of all people. He’d wished for a way to communicate with Ronan and that was where Lindenmere pushed him. The man had already felt dead when Adam yelled out his message but Adam didn’t know if possession could kill someone or if he’d already been dying because of the virus. Lindenmere then threw him out with such force that it killed a lung, half his brain, and a few other _halves_ that existed inside him, which had never happened before either. Scrying wasn’t supposed to have such an obvious physical effect on the _body_ , for the body was just the vessel. But the brain did hold the mind, Adam reasoned. 

The corridor vibrated heavily as footfalls thundered past his door. He heard screams and some crying, heard doors slam as students probably made to grab valuables. Outside, cars revved, tired squealed, there were scrapes of metal as they crashed into each other in panic. Adam didn’t dare move from his spot; he did not dare cause the old floors to creak, did not _dare_ draw attention to himself. His mind wandered to thoughts of Ronan’s arms around him and he blinked furiously and shook his head. _No_ , he told himself. _Lay out the facts. What do you_ know _?_

_Fact 1: The virus came to the United States on February 28th, as far as we know._

_Fact 2: Lockdowns across the country began March 17th. Several states, several institutions took longer to enact lockdown measures and procedures._

_Fact 3: What’s happening outside has to do with the virus._

_Fact 4: What’s happening outside has to do with Lindenmere_. 

_Fact 5: Avoid people._

His relationship with Lindenmere was similar to what it had been with Cabeswater, only with fewer obligations. Lindenmere played gentle tricks on him, sang to him, comforted him, but the demands were few and far between. Lindenmere was a Cabeswater unrestrained; a more powerful version of itself and Adam didn’t know if this was because Ronan had reached peak-dreamer status, for lack of better terms, or if Ronan had simply stopped giving the Cabeswater-now-Lindenmere otherspace rules. Lindenmere didn’t demand his time. Adam could go on a quick drive on his motorbike to fix a stone or adjust a log, or dig out some piece of trash that was stuck within the ley line, or… he could simply _not_. Lindenmere cared and didn’t care. Lindenmere was both unseemingly wild, omnipresent, and also tucked away in the recesses of Adam’s mind. 

For an otherspace of such incomprehensible power to be entwined with the arrival of a pandemic… Adam couldn’t connect the dots. He saw points A and Z but had no idea how A got to B got to C got to D and so on, so forth. Last year, Cabeswater had died to kill a demon and to save Adam’s best friend, Gansey. But that was just it: Cabeswater _had died_. It was gone. And so the evil within had also been vanquished. _Supposedly_. 

What did a virus have to do with a supernatural other-realm? 

There was an ache inside Adam that was both visceral and physical, like he wasn’t just deaf in one ear, but also missing vital organs. Each time he felt that stabbing, clenching tightness in his chest, Adam’s thoughts were on Ronan, everything Ronan. He wanted Ronan’s arms around him so bad, he gasped with the longing of it. 

Somewhere, within all that pain, Gansey’s face also surfaced. 

Adam needed them. He needed to know they were okay for sure. That they had found safety. That they— 

Adam waited with baited breath as footsteps rumbled past his door. He heard more doors slam. And then the voices faded. He peered into the water within the bowl. It was undisturbed. It was still. It was like glass. It was like glass It was like 

_WHAM_. 

Adam fell to the pavement, pain crackling through his hands, wrist, face. The wind was knocked out of him. When the pain had passed just enough, Adam was able to drag himself to his feet. He held his hands out before him: there were no scrapes, no bruises, no breaks. The pain was in his head. Lindenmere had slammed him into its reality with a punishing fervor. 

He was standing outside the Old North Church. It didn’t look so much like a church until one looked up and noticed its steeple; the brick seemed to be made up of the same brick as all the neighbouring buildings. It was just another _old thing_ in Boston. But Adam knew that the Old North Church was a point on the ley line: ley lines were mercurial things but it was entirely possible that when Robert Newman and Captain John Pulling, Jr. climbed that steeple and held two lanterns on behalf of Paul Revere to signal the movements of the British, a point of power was formed and wherever the ley line had been before, it had shifted to _include_ the church. It was also possible the ley line existed there before the church had even been constructed.

Adam should have only been able to look between the ugly brick buildings, to the church beside him, and the dingy Italian cafe on the other side. But he not only saw all the way down Salem, he saw all the way outside Boston. Ley lines criss-crossed in luminous bright blues, sparking at each source of power. He saw the entire design - a piece on modernism that covered the globe like the wires of an electric blanket. Lindenmere was the artist. But what struck Adam straight through the heart was the pulsating that hovered just outside Henrietta. 

_Show me Ronan_. 

Then he was there, inside the farmhouse and time seemed to slow and sound seemed to garble and sight seemed to blur. Ronan was on his back on the kitchen table and he was seizing, his eyes rolled back in his head, saliva and blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. He was surrounded by ghostly figures that resembled the ladies of 300 Fox Way. Adam could make out Blue, could make out Jimi, and Calla, and Mr. Gray. Even Gwenllian’s shadow could be discerned from the background. They’d managed to leave Fox Way safely, it seemed. Jimi was giving orders to Calla and Mr. Gray was pointing. Calla’s hand was locked inside one of Ronan’s and she was somewhere else as Mr. Gray shouted: _Don’t let him choke himself—_

But Ronan wasn’t being unmade. He was being _remade_. In a desperate last attempt to preserve its king, Lindenmere was re-wiring Ronan, fusing him with otherness, laying unbreakable dream material along his bones, injecting his muscle, his blood, his marrow with glowing dream particles and it was all so much for a human body to handle. It was one thing to lend one’s eyes and hands to a tamed, restrained version of an other-realm; it was a whole other thing for the other-realm to fuse parts of itself with the entirety of what makes up a human being. It was hasty, like Lindenmere was pushing itself to complete the task at superspeed, like time was unravelling. 

Ronan’s veins bulged - in his temple, his throat, his arms, his wrists. HIs mouth was open, trying to gasp for air while choking on his own saliva and blood. Jimi had grabbed his ankles, but he was convulsing so badly, she had to let go temporarily or get kicked in the face. Mr. Gray took her place instead. Then Jimi was trying to pull Blue away, saying something but Blue’s hand was in Calla’s other hand. Lindenmere’s light rose to the surface of Ronan’s skin, the one true architect of dreams, the Greywaren, and then—

TSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—

Adam was dragged away. 

He was in a city, New York he thought, but wasn’t sure. He’d never been to New York. But it must have been. No other city of this size, with all its signs in English, reeked of such hostility, intrigue, classism, boasted of its own grandeur, and also whispered its own self hatred such as this. It was empty and in its emptiness, it was even more hostile. Adam’s eyes slowly roved over the desolate cars, the empty buildings with their glass windows peering down at him. Above him was an oppressive sky. 

Nothing was dead. 

In fact, everything was alive. _Everything_ was alive. Adam could _feel_ their _aliveness_ within his veins. The buildings - the windows of their eyes, and all the life lurking silently within and behind, the cars angry and tormented and muted. As he passed, he could feel their anguish, which was easy to mistake as hatred. But no, this was utter torture. Everything here was mean as a result of mistreatment, not as a result of their creation. In the distance, he heard crying. Then he heard it again, but from another direction. And then it was right behind him!

Adam whirled around, arms up to shield his face from a potential blow, but he lowered them quickly when he saw that the person standing there had no face. It was blurred over, like it had been stolen. The person reached a hand towards Adam but the hand passed right through Adam’s body and into his heart. Then the world began to fade, all the colours melting downward, the hues and objects bleeding away. 

He was whisked into the sky, so he could see across the globe, the curvature of the Earth prominent and intimidating. Did he really have wings? Lindenmere compensating, trying to comfort him while showing the horrors of the upcoming reality, perhaps. He could see the storm coming, the rain falling at various intervals across the planet. Saw cells being taken over, corrupted, made from the same anger and torment Adam had seen within the cars of New York City. The cells struggled and bubbled, the mitochondria depolarised, and some fell into necrosis and others engaged in apoptosis, a decaying sequence that would lead to death. The rain soaked through leaves, through fur, through scales, through skin and enveloped each cell, every drop like a luminescent crystal, opalescent and dirty. The cells struggled and bubbled some more, expanding, zipping up the torn DNA strands, mutating them. Blood streams carried these strands of DNA to organs. A deer, once tawny coloured, convulsed on the forest floor, its face splitting and mutating into two, its teeth on each jaw being replaced by fangs, its fur turning white or green or deep red. Front legs broke, causing the animal to scream in pain, and bones reformed, hooves shattered into fingers that curved into claws. He saw a hawk fall through tree branches and hit the ground in a crumpled heap. After a few seconds of deathly stillness, the bird limped to its feet, feathers half-hardened scales, beak sharper and more hooked and too large for its face, tongue lolling, a row of eyes. It flew up to its nest and began to chow down on the baby chicks that had hatched there. Snakes feasted upon themselves. Insects became large as birds, as cats. As the toxic rain fell, foliage blackened, toxic, alien-looking mushrooms sprouted from the soil, long orange tendrils spilled from the lower branches of trees to ensnare prey that passed beneath. A human, missing an arm and half its face, did exactly that: passed on by, growling and snarling, and the tendrils lashed themselves against the stumbling body, searing flesh. This happened again to another humanoid figure - a figure that looked as though it had melded with a chair, overgrown with slimy looking fungus. The tree captured it within its tendrils and melted the flesh off muscle and then devoured the muscle, too, leaving bone slick with blood. 

Adam closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he was away from that evil forest, but back on what was probably Fifth Avenue and back where he could see the power grid made up of ley lines. Lindenmere cried out in despair as the ley lines sputtered and faltered, their energy being drained by some demonic evil Adam hadn’t quite met yet. 

A pulsing light could be seen from somewhere in Manhattan, a beacon of hope and Adam memorised it, loved it, held it close. For that was where salvation was. That was his prime destination. That was where he could fix things. He _could_ fix things, right? Lindenmere was malleable, like a soft metal. Ronan was the architect but Adam was the mechanic.

He was a magician. 

Adam reached for it, to take hold of it, to cup it in his palm like coveting a baby bird, but the light began to fade instead. Time passed and buildings on either side of him had crumpled, overgrown with wicked looking vines with thorns larger than his body, fungi and other things he couldn’t name that seemed drowned in toxins. The pavement was cracked and weeds had shot up amongst the cracks, some fanged, some venomous. A darkness took over; something gargantuan, a dark rider upon a dark steed that could have been an elk, a horse, no, an elephant, no— 

The figure upon its steed rose up and up and up, an arm clutching a sword of black fire. Stars were sucked into that blade. Hearts were sucked into that blade. Souls were sucked into that blade. 

_Adiuva me_ , cried Lindenmere, shocking Adam with its self-reference. _Ego vos sum et vos ego estis._

Lindenmere was Ronan. 

At the feet of this mighty rider and its steed were bodies, slung atop of one another like a mass grave. Adam saw Blue, and Henry, and Gansey, and _Ronan_ —

_NO!_

Leaves, blackened like the evil forest he’d seen seconds prior, curled around his neck, lifted him up, tightened and Adam felt his life would be swallowed up by that blade. Greener leaves, ones that had fought the virus and won, also covered him, trying to comfort him. But the comfort was short-lived as the leaves and vines blackened, just like everything else— 

_I SAID NO._

_WHAM!_

Adam was thrown against the wall, his head knocking back against the wood. He was conscious again, back in Thayer. The bowl was tipped over by his bed, a puddle spread out before it. His own face was wet and he rubbed at his eyes; he’d been crying. 

_Tu ego es et ego tu sum_ , Adam thought. A part of Lindenmere was inside him, like an extra heart, and he clutched his chest tightly as he listened for footsteps and voices. He counted slowly to fifty in Latin. Paused. Listened. Counted to a hundred. Paused. Listened. 

It seemed that the military had vacated the premises. He didn’t hear any more shouting. But there was a scuffle at his door. Adam moved, feeling like he was in muddy water, but he managed to grab the lamp off his desk. The scuffling continued. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle a— a _zombie_ , was the word that came to mind and the word that Adam reluctantly settled on. A zombie. He wasn’t Ronan. He’d never really fought back physically in his entire life. But he had to get out of there. He knew, he could see it, that if he stayed, he’d die. Adam pulled his desk away from the door. The scuffling was not deterred. Heart pounding, his hand hovered over the doorknob. He’d endured nightmares, and ghostly calls, and caves, friend deaths, and abusive fathers. Surely, he could handle _this_. 

He yanked the door open with a shout and leapt aside, brandishing the lamp like a dagger. 

But nothing charged at him. 

Instead, he heard a soft bark. 

Adam lowered the lamp. And stared. 

Tail wagging happily, a golden retriever stood at his door. It looked at him expectantly, its mouth open and tongue lolling out lazily. 

Frowning, uncertain, Adam set the lamp on the desk, and knelt down on one knee before the dog. It came right up to him, nuzzling his outstretched hand. It wore a collar, which Adam jingled as he searched for the nametag. 

“‘Lincoln,’” Adam read and then pet the dog on the head and scratched its ears. “Of course, you are.” 

He stood up. Lincoln sat down on his haunches, watching as Adam began to pack a bag. 

When Adam was ready, Lincoln yipped at him and then turned tail and went racing down the dorm corridor. Adam followed. 

With Lindenmere in his heart, boy and dog stepped out into the brave new world.

_☣_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to:
> 
> 1) audikatia for her never-ending patience, edits, and conversations about TRC/TDT as well as her input about Old North Church, and some witchy fun!  
> 2) interretalia.tumblr.com for help with the Latin  
> 3) My friend, Kathleen, for help with the Latin  
> 4) My fellow animal biologist friend, Nathan, for correcting my information about wolves/coyotes/coywolves, etc  
> 5) My friend, Ray, who let me use her personality likeness and aspects of her background for the character of Carla Kills-a-Hundred  
> 6) My friend, Louis, for letting me steal him for this, too. Louis would never leave behind a cat. 
> 
> Notes:  
> I do have 130k of this story written. But I do promise that most chapters are not gonna be this long. 
> 
> Aaaalso...I haven't been to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in about a decade. I'm aware that Columbia's position is currently elsewhere in the museum. My references were a couple of videos from 2016 on youtube. I've also never been inside Columbia but I've been inside (sort of) the Apollo 6 command module and though all the innards had been removed, they're structured similarly. I headcanon Declan Lynch being around six feet tall, more or less, and I'm a bit taller than that, so I imagined how awkward it must be for him to move around such a small space. The choreography of that scene may still read kinda weirdly because, again, I dunno how to manuever within a fully equipped module. BEEN IN THE SKYLAB MOCK-UP THOUGH. FUN SHIT. 
> 
> Honestly, there's really random stuff in this story that probably won't make a lot of sense. I'm just... being really self-indulgent. Cars driving through flames. Cars being, possibly, alive. Young men hiding out in Apollo command modules. Women hanging out with wolves. Pretty little houses with gardens and stuff. Rampant bisexuality. Young men befriending random golden retrievers... I mean...


	4. f i r s t      c o n f l u e n c e

##  iv. f i r s t c o n f l u e n c e

_ the worst thing _ _  
_ _ my heart does is tell me  
_ _ that there is something i can do to   
_ _ satisfy it  
_ _ that there’s such a thing as satiety  
_ _ (there isn’t)  
_ _ and if i just do a few small things, it will  
_ _ stop being hungry come on baby   
_ _ and on like that until i’m trying  
_ _ to pick the shattered glass out of my   
_ _ knee.  _

_ \- C. Bain, “Well, the best thing my heart does”  _

**Hamptons, New York** [03:54:44 PM, or perhaps 07:00:37 PM]

Henry Cheng liked parties when they mattered and even then, he liked them to be exclusive. Not that he used the word  _ exclusive _ , but that’s exactly what they were. He didn’t intentionally make his gatherings small; they ended up that way because, at the end of the day, Henry, though jovial, eccentric, and good-humoured, picked his friends based on only the utmost of instincts. This had proven to work immensely in his favour so why fix something that wasn’t broken? 

This did  _ not _ explain how he’d ended up at an end-of-the-school year summer pool party one of the Lord family's  _ summer _ mansions (because one mansion wasn’t enough; not that Henry really had room to talk but at least  _ he _ was properly mortified by some of his own family’s opulent expenditures, even if they were often the consequence of hard lives and survival modes). Benjamin Stefan Lord, also known as Sicksteve, was probably an unforgivable weakness of Henry’s: a skinny, short, young man of Russian-Filipino heritage, with the kind of black hair that favoured red streaks in the sun and light-brown eyes, and lips to die for and a penchant for the academic; pretty  _ and _ smart. As much part of the Vancouver crowd as Henry Broadway, and Logan Rutherford, and Li Young-Lee Jr., and Tristan Koh and —  _ well _ , as much as he was part of the crowd that terrorised Litchfield House for so many years, he was the one Henry touched the least but looked at the most. Henry had wanted to know just how well a Lord could keep a secret but he knew the Lords were not friendly territory beyond the superficial acquaintances so Henry had kept Ben at an arm’s length for much of their years in Vancouver, much to Ben’s disappointment and Henry’s own self-irritation. Then he watched one of Ben’s short videos during an art exhibit and found himself watching another and then one more, until  _ one more _ meant  _ all that was available for consumption _ . Ben was also known for his immaculate vocal impressions, as well as acting out scenarios involving characters he’d created, one of which was named Sick Steve and eventually the name just  _ stuck _ .

Henry knew when people had that  _ thing _ about them because whenever he was near people who had it, a balloon formed inside of him, a balloon filled with a sort of craving. He’d had fifty of those balloons inside him every time he observed Gansey and his Royal Court. Only anxiety stayed his hand for as long as it did. 

Only anxiety kept him from reaching out to Ben Lord.  _ May the Lord have Mercy _ . Cue snickering and eye rolling.

But as much as Henry felt spikes of anxiety course through him at even the mere prospect of going to a party with too many unfamiliar faces, Henry chose Ben over comfort and had ended up at a pool party of which was only mildly fun, served up no answers to any of Henry’s long-standing life questions, and only provided an annoying source of regret. He also had lamented at his own damp hair, no longer perfectly spiked. Without his hair styled, Henry often felt  _ regular _ and regular was also not a comfortable feeling. The balloon inside him had been punctured and no amount of water glistening on Ben’s pectorals, no amount of sunlight reflecting off of Ben’s perfect teeth, would ease Henry’s  _ unease _ . 

Thankfully, or perhaps not, the sky growled overhead and Henry, sensing a sort of static in the air that his wealthy acquaintances happily ignored for booze, eight balls, and splashes, had offered a meager excuse and vacated the premises to return to his parents’ holiday home. 

He stood in the atrium, the marble cool against the damp soles of his feet, and felt that strange overbearing smothering from the sky above, even while inside. There had been a sort of wrongness in the way the clouds hung outside. And some of that wrongness had followed Henry inside as well, but at least it came without the social pressure on top of it. Allowing his body to adjust to the stillness of the home after having been immersed in the chaos of the pool party, Henry took a breath and headed upstairs to his bedroom. 

It took him all the way to the top of the stairs before he realised what felt wrong about the house: it was just as dark inside as it was outside, meaning all the lights were out. The familiar hum of the air conditioning was absent. He stepped towards his bedroom door and flipped a hall switch. Nothing. The air was already becoming humid and warm as the summer air seeped in. Henry fished around in his pocket to text his parents about the power bill and found that his phone was dead. He supposed that was a decent enough excuse to hold off on deleting Ben Lord’s photos from his camera roll, too. 

When Henry entered his room and dropped his pool bag on his bed, he had not realised how open his room felt in comparison to the atrium and stairwell. The house was encompassed in darkness and tightness, despite its stupendous size and cost, but Henry’s room, which faced the ocean appropriately and had a skylight as well as a massive porch with freshly painted French doors that opened to a balcony, was brighter and more welcoming. Even so, Henry paused in the doorframe. He thought he heard whispers behind him, or around him. He turned to look and saw no one. His anxiety, which had already been in overdrive, caused clamminess in his hands as he remembered being stuck in that trunk of a car eight years ago or so. The whispers kind of sounded the way voices did when you were being kidnapped, when you’d been unceremoniously drugged and woke up in a nightmarish lucid state in the trunk of a car and you heard your captors speaking but you weren’t sure if it was really them or just your imagination. 

Spending his summer at the Hamptons home continuously beat in the back of his mind as a  _ really, truly, terribly bad idea _ . Honestly, what did Ben Lord have over Richard Campbell Gansey the Third and Blue Sargent? He was  _ known _ by them. He could  _ not _ be known by Ben Lord, no matter how many times they’d seen each other drunk, no matter how times they’d been high together, no matter how times they’d actually ended up in the same bed or strung across each other on a sofa, or— 

Shifting his head, trying to hear where the whispers were coming from, Henry plugged his phone into his portable charger and then quietly opened the French doors to his balcony— quietly, like he would awaken something that was lurking just out of eyesight. He felt naked without his phone, without the app that controlled RoboBee, even when he hadn’t felt the need to really use RoboBee for anything in a long time. 

Outside, the clouds were still very low. Henry didn’t think there was a sun behind those, nope, no way. The sun had been stolen. Or perhaps it died. Or went supernova but failed in succeeding at swallowing the solar system. Something touched the top of his ear and he turned, but nothing was there. The hair on his skin was raised. He leaned out over the balcony railing; he did this hesitantly as though he expected the railing to crumble, to no longer bear his weight, to let him fall. Normally, on, you know,  _ actual normal  _ days, Henry could hear things like pool parties happening a house or two down and that’s what he listened for: the Lord pool party, the music turned up to obnoxious, the laughing and shouting, even the splashing of the water. 

Henry heard absolutely none of those things. 

It wasn’t that the whispering had become so loud as to drown out those sounds either. It was that those sounds simply did not exist. There was no way the party had stopped just because he’d left it either. Ben liked him, but Ben was multi-focused and his parties didn’t end till almost sunrise the next day. 

The only way to describe Henry in that moment was  _ terrified _ . No longer trusting the railing on the balcony, he backed away from it. His breathing came out heavily. He had to force himself back inside, to close the French doors, to make his leadened limbs seat him at his desk. His desk was littered with strange odds and ends, a couple succulents, a fake bonsai tree, rave goggles, notebooks galore, Chinese calligraphy brushes, a couple of signed K-Pop albums, three bottles of hair gel, one bottle of blue hair dye, and some resin cubes that had lights inside them - random, cheap artefacts from Hong Kong. Hanging from one of the shelves of his desk was a cherished Madonna quote:  _ Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as a sheep _ . Henry didn’t consider himself particularly  _ tiger-like _ , but he definitely carved his own path, though how much of that was intentional and how much of that was purely environmental, he couldn’t ascertain. It was one of those things that required some squinting and he wasn’t a fan at looking too closely at things until he needed to. Like with a certain Richard Campbell Gansey the Third. 

Opened right in the center-front of his desk was a photo album he’d recently been compiling from all the photos that he, Gansey, and Blue had taken over the past year. He wasn’t a scrapbooker and while not completely unusual, it wasn’t habitual for him to print photos and put them in albums either. But he also had never felt so intrinsic as he did with Blue and Gansey either and it had been her idea after all. He’d always longed for something more and they’d been providing  _ more _ to him consistently since he was, sort of, inducted into their friend group. He’d seen Gansey on day one and had hoped they were destined to cross paths and, by God, if they  _ weren’t _ , he was gonna cross their paths anyway. 

How he  _ missed _ them. 

The album, coupled with all the random shit on his desk, sought to provide comfort to him in that moment of fear. The sky was groaning and he couldn’t get over the fact that it constantly felt like someone was behind him, but his friends were out there. He still wasn’t in great graces with Parrish and Lynch but they’d toned down the jokes, at the very least. Blue was with her family. But Gansey… his last words to Blue had been a week ago, no,  _ two _ weeks ago. No, wait. That wasn’t right either. Henry shook his head, but all he could hear was “Listen, a lot is going on. My parents were—” and then nothing. The whispering had faded and then there was a heavy  _ THUMP _ from downstairs. 

Henry jolted to his feet, electrified, and darted to his bedroom door. He locked the door, lodged a nightstand underneath it. Waited. Something stroked the back of his neck and he shivered. He fished in his pocket for his phone and forgot he’d plugged it into the portable charger on one of the shelves on his desk. Henry knew he needed to go back to his desk to check his phone. He also knew that he was having trouble moving. 

It was a familiar paralysis and he hated it. God, he hated it so  _ very _ much. 

He waited. Counted silently in Korean. No more strange sounds from inside the house outside of the whispering, which was only less audible so that it disappeared when Henry turned his head at certain angles. He faced his desk and next to it, the French doors to the balcony. Had the sky grown darker? Was that a shadow that passed by the French doors? Was that a hand he’d seen disappearing beneath his bed? 

Henry shook himself. He was  _ not _ in Henrietta. He was  _ not _ in Cabeswater, for it was deceased anyway. He was  _ not _ on some magical quest. He was in rich-person central, in a house that reeked of wealth, in his own bedroom, which had always proven to be a safe haven when he just wanted to escape it all. After all, he made nests wherever he went, so he’d always have his space. Gritting his teeth, he made his way across the bedroom to sit at his desk. One thing, he could appreciate: there were no real hidden corners in this room; he’d made sure of that. Nobody could actually fit beneath his bed, nobody could adequately hide in his room lest they ventured into the closet, which had a firmly shut door. 

As he slid back into the chair at his desk, Henry’s blood ran cold. 

There, resting upon the open pages of the photo album, was RoboBee. 

Oxygen was suddenly very hard to come by. 

RoboBee was a metal bee. The cover story was that Henry’s family was in the robotic bee business similar to that one  _ Black Mirror _ episode. The truth was that Henry’s mother, Seondeok, had sought out RoboBee as a dream artefact from Niall Lynch. The other truth was that, yes, Henry’s father was actually in the robotic bee business similar to that one  _ Black Mirror _ episode, though decidedly less altruistic. At first glance, RoboBee looked like a real bee. At first glance, RoboBee looked like a metal bee. At first glance, RoboBee looked like a magical bee. 

It was all the above. Legs and antennae and wings were made of intricate metal plates and wiring. It flinched and flicked its wings like a real bee. It glowed softly with the light from a small amber heart that made it a magical bee. 

And Henry was pretty sure RoboBee had been tucked away in his pool bag, which he’d set on his bed. 

_ Ben Lord be damned. Hamptons be damned. All of this shit be damned.  _

Now, it was right there, on his desk. Perched upon a photo of he, Gansey, and Blue sitting near the edge of a cliff that overlooked a massive valley. It began to vibrate. Henry’s heart beat fast. Then its mouthparts began to expand, and expand, and expand to be much too large for its head. Larger and larger the mouthparts grew and widened and Henry wrenched himself back in horror. 

His heart beat faster. 

RoboBee’s mouthparts expanded faster. 

Something was crawling out of the mouth. 

_ Pop! _

Another RoboBee was spat onto the photo album. 

The mouthparts on the new RoboBee began to expand. 

_ Pop! _

Out came  _ another _ RoboBee from the new one. 

_ Pop! _

Another. From the third bee. 

_ Pop! _ From the fourth. 

_ Pop! _

_ Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!  _

Soon, Henry’s desk was littered with several dozen RoboBees. 

And at once, they began to scream. 

◈ ◈ ◈

_ In a field _

_ I am the absence _

_ of field.  _

_ This is _

_ always the case.  _

_ Wherever I am _

_ I am what is missing.  _

_ \- m. strand _

**The Barns** [03:08:27 PM, or perhaps 05:37:46 PM]

A hand reached down and Mr. Gray took it, albeit with a rueful sigh, and got swiftly to his feet. His shoulder burned and his lungs were raw. Ronan was surveying the Evo. Calla and Jimi had had their arms raised and they were whispering some things at the invisible barrier but then they, too, turned towards them. Mr. Gray looked around, met Blue’s gaze and asked: “Maura?”

“She went into town with Orla.” Blue’s expression didn’t reflect how miserable she sounded about this fact. 

Mr. Gray looked stricken, but he knew there was nothing he could do about that fact. Not with phones dead. Not with Maura being Maura. 

The women piled into Ronan’s BMW; Blue looked reluctant but Ronan had already contemptuously thrown himself into the passenger side of the Evo remains. Mr. Gray took the driver’s seat, though gingerly. It was quite unlike him to be fazed. His years and years of training had taught him well. To the untrained eye, he looked perfectly calm, like a captain who could confidently steer through rough seas. Not that Mr. Gray was perfectly composed - he was just losing his composure quietly, on the inside, in a very controlled manner, if that made any sense. Had he been exhibiting what he was feeling on the inside  _ on the outside _ , he was quite sure it would have a negative effect on everyone else, too. 

“What’s causing this shit?” Ronan asked, by the way of greeting. It was the first time he’d seen the Gray Man in person in years and it made him tense, wary. He avoided looking at the Gray Man directly. That would be too painful. 

“I was hoping you’d have an answer to that question,” the Gray Man responded with a tight smile. If he was even slightly surprised that a Lynch brother was speaking to him, he didn’t show it. 

They drove the quick mile to the farmhouse, Ronan with a million questions on his face but actually too intimidated by the Gray Man’s own bodily tension to ask, which was very uncharacteristic of Ronan and this only sought to make him angrier. Anger was Ronan’s comfort zone; he found it better to be angry than to be depressed, than to be hopeless, because giving into  _ those _ things only made the shitty world shittier. 

The farmhouse, a beautiful, staunchly dream-like thing within a cove of dream-like things, loomed in front of them, with its wrap-around porch and its inviting front door and chimney, in its brusque plainness and hints of detail one only noticed between blinks. Outside Barns territory, the world was dark, desolate, fraught with horrors even the most tormented mind would struggle with - within, the farmhouse and its surrounding buildings and its surrounding fields and its surrounding forest appeared to be unscathed, a beacon of light amidst all the darkness. The Gray Man, having once committed a heinous crime on this very parking space, had come to appreciate the Lynch farm. It was a sign of madness, of a web of creativity and ingenuity, of peace, solitude. But the Lynches, understandably, had not come around to appreciate the Gray Man in return; there were wounds there that would take more than just time to heal.

Jimi had gone inside, but Calla, Blue and Ronan stood around the BMW. Calla looked sick and uneasy, but defiant. Blue twitched nervously, her face drawn tight with consternation. Ronan could sense edges of anger in her face, too, and silently related. None of them had ever seen the Gray Man lose his composure in the face of tribulation, but they all had seen some of the horrors that sought the Gray Man so fervently. And while they were sure such things were not unknown to people like the Gray Man and Ronan, there was a certain veracity within these nightmares that seemed to make them even more real, even more oppressive. This wasn’t just a Henrietta occurrence. In fact, they had all divined that Henrietta was neither the cause nor the focus. 

Somehow, that made things worse. 

Outside the Evo, Ronan pointed at the vehicular remains and said, “Okay, what the fuck happened?”

The Mitsubish Evo looked like a dying soldier, hospitalised and fresh from war. The trunk was gone, as was most of the back part of the upper frame. The rear glass was also gone, remnants of it lying over the shredded fabric of the backseats. Half the roof was missing, along with the side view mirrors, and every window except the windshield. What really hit home, however, were the three-foot long claw marks that ripped down the sides. The car looked as though it had just barely survived a supremely deadly encounter with  _ Indominus Rex _ . 

Blue looked up at the sky and said, before the Gray Man could respond, “I think we should go inside. That—” she pointed upwards, “—makes me really nervous.” 

_ It’s like we’re being watched. _ She didn’t have to say it out loud. Everything was thinking it anyway. 

When they entered, the Gray Man swiftly observed the company again. “Gansey? Adam? Henry?” 

Ronan and Blue had mirrored expressions of pain. 

“I’m sorry,” the Gray Man said quietly. 

“They’re not dead,” Ronan stated fiercely. 

“They’re alive,” Blue agreed, just as fierce. “We just don’t know for how long.” She  _ didn’t _ know if her mother was dead though. She had been trying to count down the time but her timer seemed to move at a snail’s pace and she wasn’t sure what time it actually was. She was also trying not to overthink this; it seemed very insensible to overreact to something when she didn’t know or understand what that  _ something _ was. She just didn’t want another repeat of last year: her mother disappearing and not being found for a while and Blue feeling like she was going stark mad dealing with it; all of her anger and resentment and sadness and fear. All of those feelings came rushing back, but this time, Blue felt she was more prepared. Her mother marching off into a city, after being explicitly warned to avoid cities, seemed like something Blue couldn’t entirely fault her for. And perhaps Henrietta wasn’t really a city anyway. 

Or so she told herself. 

But Gansey was missing-in-action. Adam, Henry, Declan, and Matthew were stuck in cities far away. 

Blue felt heavy with the unresolved grief of it all, and when she stole glances at Ronan, she saw the tightness around his eyes, the clenching of his jaw, the fraying of the leather bands around his wrists and she knew she wasn’t alone in it. That was her only solace in this place that was a living representation of the word itself. 

To the unobservant eye, the main farmhouse on the Barns property was an idyll; set back in a cove of trees, bordered on the left by the beginnings of a massive forest that swept itself into the mountains and bordered on the right by fields. To the unobservant eye, the farmhouse provided a romantic view of farm life, with its wrap-around porch, long, numerous windows with white trim, and the wonderful clash of old, rustic aesthetics and contemporary styles. To the unobservant eye, the farmhouse was a cozy, comfortable place of precisely that much sought-after word:  _ solace _ . 

The unobservant eye wasn’t entirely wrong. 

But there was a large aspect of the big  _ and _ small picture that would be missing and Ronan, heart heavy, felt all the weight of that aspect. He yanked open the screened door and main door and into the house and then gestured flatly to the den where the others had previously made themselves comfortable. Blue had sprawled herself within the confines of an Italian leather armchair that was caddy corner to two flea market, plaid sofas. The Gray Man noticed that there was electricity - or rather, the lights were able to function. Almost everything about the Barns, from the very entrance and location, down to the appliances, the soil, the glass used in the windows, was made from dreams. A braggart and a cad Niall Lynch might have been, fanciful and charismatic, swashbuckling and dangerous, liar and thief, but it could not be contested that he’d had a beautiful mind. 

Ronan, who’d always thought of himself as a master of secrets, was still uncovering the secrets the Barns had long since guarded. With Adam’s help, over the last fifteen months or so, Ronan had discovered more about the inner workings of his father’s mind than he ever thought he’d need to and it had proven to be daunting and invasive. The entire groundworks of the Barns had been dreamt up by a mind with a knack for detail. The soil upon which the Barns stood was self-replenishing, butterfly-safe for native flora and fauna, and absurdly nutrient rich. The framework of the main farmhouse seemed basic at first and rich upon deeper inspection, but that wasn’t even half of it: the cedar siding would never need replacing but the colours would fade, the porch would never need a paint job but the railing needed fixing, the shutters would never bang against the house during some of the ferocious storms that could rip through the area but they’d come loose and need to be nailed in again, the glass would never warp and never reveal the secrets inside but they could be broken, and the wind chimes would always sing impossible tunes, and sometimes, in the worst of times, those tunes would be eerily discordant. The stacks of firewood never needed replenishing, all though Ronan had oftentimes chopped firewood as an outlet for his unresolved resentment and anger.

That is, when he didn’t use Lindenmere for the same purpose. 

The butterfly bushes attracted every sort of beautiful butterfly and non-invasive moth and bees that didn’t sting, but even more than that, the bushes demonstrated a beautiful, but subtle, bioluminescence at night, each flower adorned with teeny orbs of light. Mosquitos visited but didn’t bite. Ronan didn’t understand how dream-plants worked. The chocolate-covered-peanut-packet producing plant inside the farmhouse had been his father’s but it still produced nutty chocolate whenever Ronan had a craving. Strange blue flowers adorned the grassy knolls, peeked up from the ground on either side of the drive towards the house.The Barns was rife with flowers and trees; dream orchards of apples and plums and other such things. Dream butterflies and bees, perhaps, no longer visited the butterfly bushes, but Ronan had never captured enough of them to know for sure. Could dream-butterflies mate with dream-butterflies and create dream-offspring? Things that existed beyond the boundaries of a dreamer’s life? 

Ronan and Adam had found sleeping farm cats, cats that Ronan knew from childhood, cats that chased pests, cats that didn’t overpopulate and didn’t die. One particularly sunny day, Ronan had seen something glittering in a cove of trees just next to the house. In one particularly ancient-looking tree, one whose branches reached out and obscured the upstairs of the farmhouse from view, a minutel treasure slept. Ronan had grabbed a ladder and hefted a small, beautiful owl from a nook in the tree-trunk. It was an owl made up of mirrors and it was asleep, its chest rising and falling, beams of light bouncing off each mosaic mirror piece. Each dream creature was carried to one of the longer buildings on the Barns, the building Ronan used frequently to dream safely and to store projects. 

Inside the farmhouse proved to be another maze, another puzzle that Niall Lynch had unintentionally created, a dreamlike storyboard of all the phases of his life: his anger, his own resentment, his happiness and joy, his fire and  _ desire _ , his frustration and triumph. Various paintings with even more varied themes adorned the walls of the farmhouse. Ronan had had little idea which ones were fabricated replicas and which were whimsically original, but he imagined his mother making sure each painting was straight and that Niall’s favourites were located at the focal point of each room. Each light had either fully efficient energy-saving light bulbs or no bulbs at all and still radiated light. A throw blanket was made up of a hundred million colours that shifted and changed, depending on how one looked at it, a blanket that provided only the right amount of warmth to each person who curled up within it. There was that plant that grew packets of chocolate-covered peanuts and another that sprouted aspirin and other drugs and other plants still that made no physical sense. 

Knickknacks littered bookshelves - a jade cat, a wooden frog, an old box of marzipan, a couple gyroscopes, a pair of reading glasses, model ships ranging from the cheap to intricate, teacups that glowed when held up to the sunlight, shards of stained glass, decks of cards and dice and chips, a chessboard with the wrong colours and pieces that resembled actual people, candles that functioned like phoenixes, unopened shot bottles of a whiskey brand Ronan didn’t recognise, a geode that gave off a sort of hum, a hummingbird automaton, a box made completely of clear glass, batteries of various sizes, a chipped mug with a phrase that looked like Gaelic scrawled across it and a thousand other things. A totem pole stood in the corner. A lute with the most amazing reverb was on its display rack in another. 

Ronan had transported many of these items to the Barns but several remained behind. Ronan’s reasons for choosing which ones went and which ones stayed made no sense, not even to Ronan himself, but he’d stare at the clear glass cube and feel some sort of longing. He’d lift up a candle and put it back down, suddenly unwilling to move it. The whiskey shot bottles were an aesthetic, or a memory, but of what, Ronan didn’t know. 

Ronan busied himself with fixing kitchen cabinets and floor tiling or crown moulding, and a bunch of other little things that Niall either had forgotten or hadn’t cared much about. He’d come across another random item such as a mini sculpture of the Fear Dearg inside a kitchen cabinet and he’d just leave it there because it needed to be there. 

As amazing, awe-inspiring, and agonising as the Barns was in terms of its wonderful dream magic, it also burned inside Ronan like a dying ember that fought for its last breath of life. Dreams were too much for this world. See, Ronan existed as a real person in the real world, which meant he had a viable social security number, which meant he had a paper trail, which meant dealing with the IRS. The paperwork Ronan had had to fill out to properly claim the Barn assets had been more trouble than he’d anticipated, even  _ with _ the forgeries. Another issue was that the Barns was the name for an entire  _ farm _ and even though the berry bushes kept blooming in spite of climate, and the orchards were all perfectly aligned and the fallen fruit rapidly decayed, leaving clean-looking aisles, and corn and wheat grew fast and tall, and this only covered the normal foods, farms still required a lot of work and Ronan could not handle the diversity of crop and fauna all by himself, no matter how many dream shortcuts he relied upon. But hiring help required a whole new set of paperwork and a level of trust in strangers and acquaintances that Ronan simply did not have the energy to afford doing. He waffled about this part of business, overwhelmed, annoyed, feeling led on, resenting the fact that he allowed himself to be led on, and wondering how the  _ hell _ his father had managed it, wondered if Ronan just lacked the sort of grit and skill needed to run a farm. He considered just letting the farm grow itself to death but the thought, and the images that came with it, only caused Ronan to ache. If he planted his grief within a bed of blue flowers, he was certain it would die there if he were more capable of neglect. 

Even the prettiest of cages was still a cage. 

And though Cabeswater had gone, and Lindenmere had been wrought its ashes, neither the Barns or its accompanying dreamscape offered Ronan any answers to his questions. He hadn’t been successful with waking his father’s dream fauna, but he’d amassed his own: a minivan-sized boar who did his bidding, stags with enormous antlers and strange fur, fireflies that lit up because they wanted to, pastel mice and soft dragons. Sure, he could send off Niall’s dreamt creatures to exist in Lindenmere as it existed within the confines of Earthly reality, but Ronan could be a selfish creature. A thirty minute drive west, a twenty minute hike, within an hour of the old observatory, Lindenmere reigned. 

All cages were cages and Ronan felt that maybe he  _ hadn’t _ learnt the lesson he was supposed to have learnt when Cabeswater died for him, died for Henrietta, died for  _ Gansey _ . 

Lastly, his father had been brutally murdered just outside the farmhouse, where the destroyed Evo was currently parked. A tire iron to the face, bone and brain visible through layers of dried blood, an eye hanging out of a demolished eye socket. 

The man who’d murdered his father and left the body like that for a Lynch son to come home to was currently seated across from Blue in the living room. Fifty feet, perhaps, from the site where Niall Lynch, infamous braggart and cad and bred of Belfast fire, had died. 

To the observant eye, to the casual passerby, the Barns was, indeed, solace. 

But for a Lynch… well. Lynches were born there. Lynches died there. 

Even the prettiest of cages was still a cage. 

In that moment, spicy scents filled the air as soup brewed in the kitchen. Chainsaw, Ronan’s dream raven, was pecking at onion skins on the island in the kitchen, occasionally singing at Ronan. Opal came running into the living room and handed Ronan a piece of driftwood with dirt and glitter on it. Gwenllian, who had returned from the kitchen with Jimi and had sat promptly on the floor, her back to the fireplace, gave the driftwood a contemptuous glance. She and Opal, though as cordial as a six-hundred-year-old woman and a psychopomp could be, weren’t each other’s biggest fans. 

“That’s nice, weirdo,” Ronan said gruffly, but fondly, taking the driftwood. She clambered onto the sofa behind him and wrapped her skinny arms around his neck from behind. Without looking at the Gray Man, Ronan told him what had happened. When Ronan had left the Barns, everything had been sleeping or maybe dead. The power had gone out. And the Barns had shifted between parallel realities. When Ronan had returned to the Barns, with Calla and Blue and Gwenllian and Jimi, he’d returned to life, to Opal singing his welcome home, to Chainsaw berating him for leaving her, to farm cats eyeing him appraisingly, to the appliances humming with wonderful liveliness. Since, the power had flickered and, sometimes when it did, Opal and Chainsaw would momentarily go limp, and then the power would come back and come back strong, and Opal and Chainsaw moved back into motion. Cell phones would click on; Ronan would dial Adam, Gansey, Matthew. But they wouldn’t pick up. 

There were too many people inside the farmhouse and Ronan was beginning to feel claustrophobic and restless. 

The Gray Man talked about the military helicopters dropping fire bombs onto the highway. Calla and Ronan both let out creative swears in different languages. 

“This isn’t a Henrietta occurrence,” the Gray Man said. 

“It’s a ley line one,” Ronan finished, angry. He got up and rummaged around in a box on a bookshelf. He pulled out a massive wad of folded paper and a transparency with marker lines and a grid on it, knocked books to the side of the coffee table, set the glass creation on the middle of the coffee table onto the floor. And then he unfolded the paper and spread it out. It was a map. Blue, grateful to be doing something that felt useful, grateful for the distraction, slid like butter out of the chair and onto the floor. Ronan took a luminescent, small silvery pen out of the pocket in his flannel and circled Henrietta and just outside Henrietta, the Barns. “Us.” He then circled the part of the highway the Gray Man described as being on fire. Then D.C.

“This is one ley line,” he said. He laid the transparency over the map, matching up longitude and latitude coordinates. “According to Parrish, these were where the ley lines were last. I don’t keep track of all of this—” he pointed and tapped his finger on different areas of the map, “ —because they don’t affect this area so much.” The Gray Man leaned over to survey the map. He had seen such maps before in his previous line of work. 

“The virus,” he said, “came to America late February. Lockdowns began March seventeenth. Casualties have reached over a hundred million in America alone.” Ronan started to interrupt but the Gray Man shook his head and continued. “It’s May as far as we know.” Blue frowned at that. “D.C. was burned to the ground. The bombs have reached the outskirts of the Shenandoah Valley. What you saw on the television at Fox Way was possibly caused by this virus. Local power grids have been unstable for weeks and now, entire cities are without power. Right now, even with the power currently on, we have no cell service and I’m not sure that’s because of all the magic.”

“And what about the ley line part?” Blue asked, looking pointedly at Calla. “I  _ know _ you know something. I saw the looks you and Mom gave each other. It’s no use hiding it from the rest of us.”  _ St. Mark’s Eve had taken on a different tone this year. _

Calla huffed, arms folded over her chest. She had donned gloves because touching things at the Barns was overwhelming. The amount of emotion poured into each piece of furniture and decor and animal had proven to be too much for her to deal with all at once. Blue had had a feeling that if Calla had her choice, she wouldn’t be at the Barns at all, but she, like Maura, like Jimi, had known the Barns would be exactly what it needed to be to them: a place of solace, a place to consider the world, its events, and what to do about it. Calla opened her mouth to speak but Ronan cut her off. 

“The Evo,” was all he said. 

Calla glared at him. “ _ No _ .” What came across as being unintentionally helpful was really just Calla being afraid, Blue knew, and if Calla was afraid, Blue knew there was a good reason to fear for what was happening - not just because of missing boyfriends, death tolls of astronomical proportions, and scary shadows with gnashing teeth - but because there wasn’t a feasible end to any of it. They’d resolved the last apocalypse within the confines of their small corner of the Shenandoah Valley.  _ This _ apocalypse not only involved them but was being performed on a global stage. 

How were these few expected to resolve something so devastating? 

The Gray Man remained impassive. “If it weren’t for the Evo, I would probably be dead.”

“Or maybe it’s because of your stupid car that you were in danger to begin with.” Calla was just being insensibly petulant at this point and Blue bristled at this; it only made Orla and Maura’s absences that much more noticeable. The Gray Man inclined his head, peaceably acknowledging Calla’s derisiveness and said, 

“The Evo feels very similarly to inanimate objects in this very house. Alive. It drove with a type of sentience.”

“It’s also a dream object,” Calla said. As though that explained everything. 

“Yeah, but cars—” Blue began when suddenly, there was a flash of dark feathers, and a loud  _ KERAH! _ And Chainsaw came flapping through the living room, bumping into walls, before darting out again. Ronan bolted to his feet. 

“Chainsaw?” He dashed into the hall. The raven kept shrieking and a bunch of voices rose up at once. “ _ Chainsaw! _ ” Ronan, followed by Blue, Opal, and Mr. Gray, and then Calla and Gwenllian, entered the kitchen. Jimi was holding up her arms and at first, Blue thought she was trying to beat away a deranged Chainsaw, but then she realised that Jimi was trying to  _ catch _ Chainsaw. 

Then, the lights went out.

Blue felt Ronan slump to the floor beside her. The raven fell silent as she and another body crashed to the floor with sickening crunches. The groaning from the sky above was suddenly very audible in the shocked silence that followed. 

“ _ Ronan! _ ” Blue couldn’t see him in the dark; the Barns, even lacking the light from the dream-made nightlights, had been thrust, along with all its occupants, into the kind of darkness shared by outer space, the void, a black hole maybe. She could feel him beside her; he was twitching, grunting, teeth clacking. “Ronan, Ronan—!”

A body beside her: Mr. Gray. And then, a light: Jimi and Calla had lit a candle, two candles, four candles. Gwenllian had an oil lamp lightly swinging from her fist, momentarily a Victorian painting. Firelight flickered across Ronan’s body. He was convulsing, twitching, shuddering, face drawn tight like he was in intense agony. 

“Clear the table. Don’t let him choke! Jimi, please help me lift him—”

Calla, Blue and Gwenllian (though a little less helpfully) all scuttled around each other, removing plates and cutting boards and cutlery and miscellaneous odds and ends that had littered the kitchen table. Ronan was hefted onto the table, where he whimpered and cried out and flinched. The Gray Man shifted him onto his side as Blue set up the candles in strategic positions out of danger, but close enough to cast sufficient light. Then she scooped up Chainsaw, who was asleep, and set her in an empty wooden bowl on the counter. Jimi gently lifted up Opal, who was also asleep and not enduring whatever torment Ronan was, and set her in an armchair. 

“Calla, he’s going to need you,” Mr. Gray said. 

“No way—”

“You know how this works better than me.”

Shadow flicking across her face, giving the impression that her dark eyes were glittering, Calla slowly removed her gloves. Tears glimmered on Ronan’s cheeks. After all, Lynches were known for dying in cages. 

“Blue—”

Calla opened out a hand and Blue took it with a shudder. Then Calla drew a deep breath and placed her other hand within Ronan’s. 

Ronan screamed. 

He flipped onto his back, a white glaze covering his eyes, and Calla yelled with him, her head back, eyes wide - his irises were blue, then brown, green, grey—

Beads of light raced from Ronan’s chest, along his arm, to his hand, and across and into Calla. Blue felt like she’d just stuck her finger in an electrical socket— 

And then everything went white. 

◈ ◈ ◈

**Somewhere outside Boston, MA** [06:10:12 PM, or perhaps 03:13:57 AM]

Adam groaned; his head felt like it had been split in two. 

The car had met a tree and smoke was coming out from the raised dents in the hood. Glass littered the dashboard, Adam’s lap. His hands were covered in cuts and burgeoning bruises. He lifted his head from the steering wheel. His skin was sticky as was the steering wheel where blood had dried and flaked upon it. 

“Lincoln?” he managed to croak out. There was a golden wagging of fur beside him; Lincoln was sitting on the seat, watching him and yipping softly. “Lincoln!” With another groan, and a sharp jagged pain that pulled at his chest, Adam unhooked the seat belt, glared at the airbag smeared with blood, and moved over to check on Lincoln. He let his fingers feel Lincoln’s legs and ribs. Checked his face for scratches but the dog seemed unharmed. 

“You’re a lucky pup, you know that?” Adam’s voice sounded like it’d been dragged over gravel. “Honestly, we’re  _ both _ very lucky.” 

He sat for several moments trying to regain a breath he didn’t remember losing. Something touched the back of his neck and Adam jerked around in his seat, crying out in pain as he did. Nothing was there. He slapped an aching, trembling hand to the back of his neck. His skin was bare, devoid of bugs and debris. Nothing was there. Nothing was  _ there _ . 

Somewhere nearby, either outside the car, or right next to his good ear, or maybe even inside his own head, there was music. It was soft, tender, and reminded Adam of a trickling creek through Lindenmere. It sounded like starlight. Wind chimes. He turned his head side to side, trying to get an idea of where it was coming from but as soon as he did so, it faded. 

With an exasperated exhale, Adam weakly pushed the door open and crawled onto the lumpy grass. He was able to pinpoint where the pain came from as he moved. His left upper rib cage burned. A wrist ached. There was a stinging pain that tore across the bridge of his nose and down his cheek. His whole body felt as though he’d been on one of those horrible wooden roller coasters at shitty, overpriced amusement parks. He’d been only to one and it was when he was a child and other family members were still somewhat in the picture: the occasional aunt or uncle or sister-in-law. Adam felt as banged up as that memory and he bit back a groan as he surveyed himself.

Lincoln bound noiselessly after him, tongue lolling, tail hanging low but still wagging. Adam turned and lay back on the dampened grass, staring at the monstrous sky above him, and tried to piece together events. He’d narrowly made it out of Boston. The military had been setting up a perimeter behind him but Adam kept to side roads, and often parked to the side when helicopters flew overhead. He’d wait ten minutes before driving again. He kept off his headlights. The sky wasn’t dark enough yet that he’d needed them and Adam worried about when it would be, if nighttime even worked the same way anymore. 

It had been a slow drive. He’d passed other cars and people, and it was within crowds that he felt safe from the military, but it was also within crowds that he knew he was not safe from the virus. He’d kept his mask on his face, mostly for the fact that it hid him more than it being a useful defense against an airborne pathogen that had mutated beyond scientific comprehension. Sure, if this had been SARS, Adam knew masks were good, effective tools against contamination. But this was something else.  _ It came from Russia. It’s from a biolab. It came from North Korea. It came from rural China. It came from Beijing, look at that air pollution! _ Commentary he’d heard over the past couple of months ran through his mind. Adam hadn’t expected things to escalate so quickly. Just a couple weeks ago, the power grids across the globe flickered and went out. And then came back on seconds later. Satellite disruption. Rising panic. People getting sick everywhere. World leaders trying to calm populations as people were hospitalised by the truck load in places like Mumbai and Shanghai and Osaka and Singapore. And then Dubai fell into chaos. Riyadh and Jeddah. Tel Aviv. Cairo. Rome. Stockholm. Cape Town. Lusaka and Nairobi. Casablanca and Tigris. London and so on. Over two weeks, casualties had skyrocketed. Rumours circulated American media that the virus was possibly American. 

Adam knew the answer to that and it was yes, the virus was American. But not because it had been released by some disease facility in the States. But because the part of the virus that caused so many deaths, that was threatening everything, that made the sky look like  _ that _ , came from another world, a world that, so far, Adam knew was only accessed by a small group of Americans, himself included. 

Lindenmere was under attack. 

So, Adam had been trying to get to Henrietta as fast as he could. 

Which was not very fast at all. 

He’d stopped at a mart within a gas station to get a map (and gas) since his phone alternated between being dead and being charged but without service. The store had power and there was a small television set on the back part of the counter. The connection was incredibly staticky so only a few words could be heard and the TV cut out a lot but Adam heard key words like “checkpoints” and “quarantine zone” and “border patrol” and knew the interstate wasn’t going to be a safe bet. It was going to be a tricky, non-linear drive to Henrietta and the longer it took, the more antsy Adam became. As Adam dug out his wallet to pay for the map, as the clerk ignored the fact that there was a dog sitting in his store, the clerk rang up the map and looked sadly at the card machine and said, “I have a feeling money isn’t gonna matter much soon.”

“You’re right,” Adam had responded. 

Sensing a certain truth within Adam, perhaps, the clerk asked, “Is there anywhere safe to go?”

“No.”

Adam thanked the man and left the store. Sitting in the stolen Lexus, Adam was about to pull out of the parking lot but then Lincoln barked at him. Adam stared the dog for a few seconds and then, instinctively, made his way to the back exit of the gas station instead of taking the one on the main drag. As he turned out of the parking lot, he saw in the rearview mirror several cars swerving in front of the convenience store. Almost a dozen men armed swarmed the property. 

Heart heavy, Adam drove away. 

A part of him naively hoped the man was okay. Another part of him hoped the death had been quick because it was probably better to be dead than to try to survive what was coming. He was unsurprised by the fact that people were often terrible. 

Shortly after getting on the road and going a few miles, Adam was thrown into the scry. 

_ Lindenmere, keep me safe! _

A gold maple leaf. 

The fender of a car sticking out of a leg. 

A familiar hand on his chest, pushing him back. 

Three moons. Two moons. One moon. 

Trees with memories. 

Gwenllian, in Persephone’s voice:  _ Have you ever solved a riddle you weren’t asked? _

Being crushed. Drowned. 

An ivory key looped around a plastic neck. 

Diving off a cliff, sprouting wings and flying. 

Blue’s laugh. 

Kavinsky, with his chest eaten out. 

Ronan yelling at someone Adam’s couldn’t see. 

Mint leaves on a picnic blanket. 

Water striking the cracked tile of a shower stall. 

An unnamed red flower that dripped blood on a pile of corpses. 

Skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. 

And that was when Adam woke up, groaning in pain, stiffness, and soreness. The smell of gasoline perforated the air. He’d never been able to scry without a tarot card, or a bowl of liquid. Had he put himself into a trance state on accident? Or had that been a murder attempt? Lindenmere wouldn’t have tried to kill him, would it? Was it the virus? 

Somewhere in the distance, large church bells sounded. Adam froze, listening, and then he agonisingly turned onto his stomach and crawled up the shallow ravine to the road. Unlike the wind chimes that had chirped in his ear just moments before, these bells were deep, resonant, ominous. They filled the air with powerful command. They weren’t so loud as they were just simply  _ suffocating _ . 

It was a good thing he crawled instead of climbed. From his position, he was hidden from view, just beneath the guard rail, of what was coming: it looked to be an army, a legion of bodies, each one mostly human, but with missing body parts, or with too many body parts, or with parts that didn’t look as though they belonged. Blood dripped down faces and stained clothes. Gore hung from bellies or the backs of skulls. At the forefront of the legion were large beasts that may have been human at one point but were so bloated, convoluted, that they were hardly recognisable. They were huge, standing at least twelve or fifteen feet tall. These were the generals. 

Adam, his blood ice in veins, watched as the army trudged by, thousands of feet dragging and stomping, a slow rhythm made of dread, a slow rhythm made of the dead. 

When they’d passed, when the bells faded, after what felt like hours, Adam, his throat dry, just lay there, trying to calm his racing heart, trying to get feeling back into his arms and legs so he could put as much distance between the army and himself as he could. Lincoln was laying down beside him. Adam couldn’t recall Lincoln crawling up to join him, but he would never protest the company of his new canine companion. He placed a hand upon Lincoln’s ruff, clutching the fur between his fingers, soaking in the reassurance that came with it. 

Adam didn’t know how much time passed before he felt confident enough to get to his feet. He moved with painstaking slowness. He needed to find another vehicle, another method of transportation. He needed speed. He needed Ronan. 

He clambered awkwardly over the guardrail and stood upon the edge of the interstate. Something touched the back of his neck again, touched the back of his ear, touched his earlobe. 

But nothing was there. 

Something chimed gently in his good ear, just a couple of frugal, weakened sounds. 

Adam finally took in the scene before him. 

He absent-mindedly reached for Lincoln again. His heart had frozen. 

Before him was an overgrown wasteland. 

Before him, the highway was littered with cars and trucks, all in various stages of rust and decay. 

Before him was a graveyard. 

  
  


◈ ◈ ◈

  
  


**Henrietta, VA** [05:19:01 PM, or perhaps 08:27:26 AM]

Maura took another sip of her ale. As she did, she caught movement in the mirror and her heart stopped. She didn’t have to say Orla’s name. 

“Holy— ”

In the mirror, Maura could see the entire tavern laid out behind bottles of alcohol. She could see the reflections of the paintings, of the booths, of the hanging lamps, of the rustic decor. She could also see the people. They drank and ate and chatted. Glasses were held in twisted, mangled hands. Jaws were hanging loose or missing all together. Skulls were bashed in, eyeballs hanging out. Throats ripped to shreds. Caverns where there should have been rib cages. Billy the Bartender was facing them and he looked so normal, so bright and  _ real _ compared to what he looked like in the mirror, his back torn as if ripped by some powerful claws. Another pub goer had no lips, no nose. Another had a pole shoved through his mouth. A skull blown to bits. Another was completely missing a head, decapitated. On the bar, in the reflection, were candles, a dozen of them, two dozen of them. They looked as though they’d sprouted from the wood of the countertop itself. The flickering of the flames cast odd shadows upon the animated corpses. 

“You see that, right,” Maura whispered, her voice low, barely audible. She could feel Orla nod slowly. Maura glanced around at the people in the pub. None of them seemed to have noticed their grotesque reflections. Noticed or  _ could not see. _

“We… we look okay.” Orla’s voice was soft. Flat. “Why do  _ we _ look okay. Why do  _ they _ look like that—” 

“Because they’re all going to die.”

The lights went out. 

The pub was soaked in darkness. 

A bunch of cries went up in protest, indignation, fear. 

And then it was quiet. 

Outside, the rain lashed against the windows and the sky groaned. 

Maura and Orla stared at each other, frozen, waiting with baited breath. 

Someone screamed, a high-pitched wail. 

It dropped away. 

No one spoke. 

Someone else screamed, a woman in distress, younger. A banshee. 

It, too, dropped away. 

Maura stood up. She put a hand on Orla’s arm, indicating that she should stay there and wait for her. Maura made her way through the silent crowd. They were almost frozen, like cadavers just sitting there at the tables, slumped over the bar. Maura carefully picked her way through the silence, aware of the fact that heads turned and eyes watched her warily. Some of the pub goers murmured amongst themselves. But most of the chatter had died down. No glassware clinked. 

Someone started crying, an eerie, uneven series of choked sobs and wordless pleas, soft and destructive. Maura paused for only a moment before she continued to make her way towards the source of that god awful bawl. There, at the end of the bar, beyond the dim flickering of the candlelight in the mirror, sat a doll. Just another doll, like every other doll. Walk down any toy store aisle and those dolls were this one. It was a baby, a toddler maybe. The only strange things about it were the missing eye and the fact that it had its mouth open in a continuous stream of sobs. Chills ran through Maura like a hayfire. The sobs were thick and miserable, false and strange. 

_ BANG _ .

A gunshot rang out. Maura, hands over her head, whirled around. One of the pub goers was standing, his body silhouetted, a strange, chiaroscuro. His arm was outstretched, his hand wrapped around a pistol. Maura turned to look at the doll. It had been blasted off the bar and was laying on the ground, most of its head demolished. It was still crying, but intermittently, robotically. Around its neck was a key made of bone. Maura reached for it but before she could take it, someone else screamed, a sudden spike of sound through the quietness, through the lull of the baby’s sobs, and the rain, and the sky overhead. 

Maura yanked her hand back and straightened up. 

Another scream as soon as the first one ended. 

Another as soon as the previous one ended. 

Men, women, of all ages. 

All types of voices. 

Long distinct wails. 

Shrieks. 

Screeches. 

Fear and pain and misery. 

And then a familiar scream pierced the air and Maura’s blood turned to ice. 

“ _ Orla _ !” 

Maura made her way back towards the front of the pub. Hands, twiggy and clawed, decayed and bloodied reached for her as she passed. Eyes leered at her. People began to stand and Maura saw that they were no longer people, but cadavers. With soft moans and growls, they began to press in around her. Orla screamed again. 

_ “ORLA!! _ ”

The stink of rotted flesh filtered through Maura’s nose. She was soaked in it. She thought of Blue. She thought of Calla. She thought of Persephone—

Was it just her imagination or were the cadavers whispering her name?

Was it just her imagination or was one of them partially made of bark? And another with a chest filled with forks? And another with bugs for eyes? And another with hands made of flatirons? And another with a rib bone protruding from its mouth? 

She couldn’t remember their names. She couldn't remember their stories and for this, she was glad. 

But she didn’t feel relief until she arrived at the front of the pub. Orla was frozen, her skin bleached with terror, her jaw slack, hanging much too low to be natural. 

“Orla, Orla, Orla—” Maura said, slapping her cheek lightly. “Please come back to me, please—”

The zombies were sluggishly making their way towards them. 

“Come on, we have to get out of here—”

Orla’s eyes finally met Maura’s and her mouth shut with a wincing  _ snap! _ She nodded. 

“Gotta go,” she mumbled. 

“Yes, gotta go,” Maura agreed, snatching an umbrella off the countertop, steering Orla towards the door. The zombies were feet away from them. Six feet. Five feet. Maura struggled to get the door open. Orla wasn’t moving fast enough. A shadow passed by the windows and Maura didn’t know which she feared most: the zombies in the pub or the unknown that lurked outside in the rain. She hated that rain.  _ Hated _ that rain. 

They had to get to the car. 

Fingertips grabbed at her clothing. Her skin crawled as dead, slimy flesh grazed her. 

Then Maura and Orla were outside. She whisked open the umbrella immediately. Orla shivered beside her. It was just another warm spring day, or maybe it was summer already, maybe May had come and gone, but the humidity made her cold. 

Maura ushered them towards the BMW. She dragged the keys from her pocket, clumsy in her one-handed attempt to single out the car key. She separated it from the rest of the keys and started to unlock the doors. 

“Oh, fuck, fuck—” 

“Orla?”

Orla was no longer covered by the umbrella. She was standing beneath the rain, that filthy, hateful, toxic rain. 

“No!”

Maura dragged Orla under the umbrella but it was too late. Her skin began to sizzle and boil as blood puffed up from the pores. Orla turned her gaze on Maura. Her eyes were wet with pain. 

“Get me home,” she said, as the blood began to trickle down from her hairline, from her cheeks, from her throat. Maura yanked open the passenger side door and shoved Orla sloppily onto the seat. Orla fell weakly, shaking, trembling, convulsing. Maura hurried to the front door, started the car, and, with as much speed as she could muster, drove off. She was oblivious to the gargantuan many-legged shadow that lurked not too far away, hidden by trees, buildings, and rainy mist. 

◈ ◈ ◈

_ What is a home _

_ if not the first place you learn to run from? _

_ \- c. von radics _

_ It is impossible to be the only _

_ burning room in a house _

_ made of fire.  _

_ \- salma deera _

**The Barns** [07:56:13 PM, or maybe 11:37:08 AM]

_ Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep—  _

His fingers were splayed wide on a familiar chest and his throat felt as though he’d swallowed sandpaper; he’d yelled himself sore, he’d begged, he’d pleaded— 

Ronan could only blink his eyes for the first few moments; his entire body screamed at him, every joint stiff, anguished, like he’d just been hit by an eighteen-wheeler, or suffered the most grievous of hangovers. The beeping sound continued to penetrate his skull for much too long before some unseen force silenced it. He stared up at the ceiling. What did he remember? 

_ Water _ . 

Water beating off decrepit tile, small vines coming up from the cracks in the ceramic. Lips between his legs, a tongue licking along his inner thigh, familiar, but not  _ right _ — 

_ So much water— _

He was being dragged down into dark depths and he couldn’t breathe. His lungs were burning, screaming along with the rest of him, threatening to burst. The light from above was fading fast as darkness suffocated him, as the ocean’s pressure threatened to crush him. 

He was at the Barns, the familiar ceiling overhead. His lungs were still on fire and he gasped for air and then the world went sideways as he rolled and toppled off of the kitchen table. There was a shout. Ronan caught himself on his bad leg, the leg that had been stabbed right through the shin, the leg that was bleeding profusely. He needed a hospital. He was still drowning. 

Ronan vomited ocean water and bile all over the floor. 

“Ronan!” came another shout, a female one. There was a hand on his back, and two other hands beneath his arms, lifting him up. 

“Jesus Christ,” someone said. 

“I’ll clean that up,” someone else said. 

In his mind’s eye, Ronan saw a car go flying off the edge of a mountainside. Amidst the pain in his leg, his lungs being rolled across searing coal beds, he croaked out, 

“ _ Adam! _ ” 

Yes, he knew now, for sure, that he was at the Barns. He wasn’t drowning. His lungs were fine. His leg was… 

He allowed himself to be dragged upward and pushed gently onto the table. Weakly, trembling, he hoisted himself up. He blinked hazily in the light. Faces. Lots of faces. Some clear, defined, structured in high-definition. Others less so. Shadows. They were there and then they were gone and the kitchen was nicely lit. Electricity hummed gently throughout the room. The smell of citrus drifted through the room. His teeth were threatening to fall out of his mouth, one by one, so Ronan worked to unclench his jaw. A raven hopped onto his lap. 

Oh, good, there was a raven perched upon his lap. 

Ronan lifted a hand — it weighed a full metric tonne — and stroked the raven along its neck. Her neck. 

_ Chainsaw _ . 

“Ronan?!” came a young-sounding voice, hesitant and cautious as it was, it still startled him. Something shifted, a chair, and something else moved towards him, a body. Ronan swallowed, tasting the remnants of bile. 

“Sargent?” Oh, good, there was his voice. It sounded exactly as he felt, but Ronan didn’t care. He was no longer dissociating. Reality sank in. The table beneath him was very much  _ there _ and it creaked and Chainsaw hopped onto an empty spot. “ _ Fuck _ .” He was still sore in places he didn’t even know  _ could _ be sore, which was pretty rich coming from someone who worked the land pretty regularly. 

“It’s probably not a good idea to move just yet,” Blue said in exactly the kind of tone that suggested she knew Ronan wouldn’t care. And Ronan didn’t care. She was right but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He made a noise. Blue handed him a bag of ice, which he pressed to his forehead. The world was slowly starting to make sense again. He had not actually been drowning. His leg was fine. No one was leaving kisses in places reserved for Adam Parrish. 

And Adam Parrish was not dead. 

“I don’t need you,” he snarled at someone standing behind Blue, in a doorway. “You’re not my father. Stop trying to be one.” The Gray Man hesitated only a fraction before nodding in affirmation and bowing silently out. Ronan glared until he was sure the Gray Man was actually gone and not just waiting outside the kitchen, listening in. Chainsaw looked up at Ronan. 

“ _ Atom? _ ” she croaked at him. Ronan shook his head, which just made his world swim, so he closed his eyes. 

“What the hell happened?” he asked of Blue. 

“You collapsed. You had some sort of seizure. The power went out again for a while…”

“I feel like I participated in a hundred triathlons.”

“Calla did a reading on you, with my help.” Blue’s voice was small as though she expected Ronan to get mad at her for such a thing, but her voice was also laced with indignation as she was prepared to defend herself. But Ronan didn’t get mad. 

“Yeah?” he asked curiously, opening his eyes, bracing for the onslaught of light. “What did she see?”

“She has a policy of not telling people unless she has consent or if there’s trouble afoot.”

“Isn’t there trouble afoot?”

Blue rolled her eyes. “You were still alive and you were obviously going to wake up at some point. What, did you want her to wait until you were dead? Calla didn’t tell anyone what she saw through you. She only said it was the most vivid and strange reading she’d ever done. She was crying.”

“ _ I _ was crying.” He remembered that. A glimpse of white, downy pillows, a couple of stray leaves glittering in golden light. A searing hot pain just below his knee. Bare skin beneath his fingers. He’d seen an ocean, spread vast and dark beneath multiple moons. Latin whispers on the wind, in the rustling of leaves. Being dragged through space, or maybe water, suffocating. Ronan had felt the slime of wet shower tile against his bare back, teeth on his lower lip. A mouth between his legs. Ronan didn’t want to think about that mouth. Something about that particular memory sent a wave of heat through him like his insides had been branded with a fire poker. “I had… It was…” He faltered. Flying. Lots of flying. “It was so much at once. I think I felt  _ him _ . I think Adam was scrying and I was dreaming and we crossed paths in that dreamspace but it was violent, like Lindenmere was pushing us together in a… Like Lindenmere was rushing to show us something before…”

“Before it started raining,” Blue finished. Ronan met her gaze and he saw that her eyes were red. She’d also been crying. A building crumbling to the ground. 

“Yeah.”

“It’s raining everywhere. But the rain is different here, at the Barns, than it is out— out there.”

Ronan raised his arms and stretched his back. “You need to start at the beginning.” 

Blue didn’t immediately speak so Ronan limped past her to the fridge. He pulled out two large brown cubes, dropped them in mugs he grabbed from the cupboard and handed one to her. She took it in wonder. 

“Matthew’s idea,” Ronan said, waiting to see her judgment. 

Blue barked out a mix of a laugh and a “ha!” sound before she raised the mug to her lips and drank. She finished the whole mug in one go and when she was done, there was a brown chocolate mustache across her upper lip. “You owe me a lifetime supply of whatever this is. It tastes like—”

“The best damn hot chocolate you’ve ever had?”

“ _ Yeah _ .  _ God _ . Godiva and Ghirardelli could  _ never _ .”

“Mine also comes with the added benefit of dream calories.”

Blue frowned suspiciously at him. “Which means  _ what _ exactly?”

Ronan shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea. I don’t think I dreamt calories for anything.”

“You mean to say that I could actually have a lifetime supply of this and never have to worry about my waistline?”

“Do you actually worry about your waistline?”

“Not particularly.”

“Damn, I was hoping I wasn’t the only one.” Ronan grinned at her. Blue rolled her eyes. 

The mood sufficiently lighter, the tension seeping out of them, the dream hot chocolate had done its job. Ronan set his mug on the table and Chainsaw peered into it curiously. Blue pulled a stool over and sat, her previous elation fading into somberness. After all, much of the world was dead. “You had a fit. Mr. Gray and Jimi lifted you onto the table and then Calla took your hand and my hand. Your body went on the fritz before you went still and you were out for a while. Not like… totally unconscious, but like you were stuck in a deep sleep. Chainsaw and Opal went down when you did. But the power kept flickering and eventually came back on a while ago. They woke up but you didn’t.”

“Where’s Opal now?” Ronan was surprised she wasn’t there. 

“She mentioned something about a floating cow?”

“Gasoline,” Ronan said and groaned. “She’s out by the pool then.”

Blue shrugged because none of that made sense to her. She’d only been to the Barns once before, had only been inside very briefly, and so, even though Ronan was her friend, she still felt like a porcelain figurine in a house filled with scrimshandered artifacts. And Blue did not like  _ feeling _ like a porcelain figurine. The whole farmhouse felt as intimate as Gansey’s bed at Monmouth Manufacturing had been. “The last burst of power came on, I don’t know, twenty or thirty minutes ago? None of the clocks seem to be keeping accurate time so I don’t really know how much time has passed since but it started to rain then, too. Just as this—” she held up the beeper that she’d had clipped to her shirt and Ronan recalled the noise that woke him up with distaste, “—went off.” She seemed utterly miserable at this. “I should have turned it off right away but I couldn’t make myself…” Ronan remembered now. Blue had given one timer to Orla and Maura and kept one for herself. She’d given them two hours to go into Henrietta and come back. 

“Let’s go get them,” he said. 

Blue looked up at him. “Calla said we shouldn’t leave— go beyond the perimeter. She said the rain is different out there.”

“How the hell does that even  _ figure _ ? Rain is rain.”

Blue shrugged helplessly. “She said the Barns offers protection. She said the rain  _ here _ is normal rain. It won’t hurt us. But the rain outside...She said it could kill anyone who goes out there.”

Ronan was only quiet for a moment, taking that in. Chainsaw’s beak clinked against the mug as she tried to drink the remnants of hot chocolate. “I can’t stay here,” he said finally. He could tell Blue felt similarly. Too many people inside his home. Faces he liked well enough and faces he didn’t. “I’m gonna go crazy if I stay here, doing nothing, doing nothing but what-if’ing the entire damn time. Waiting. Fucking  _ waiting _ . I can’t wait, Sargent. You saw the shit on the television. You saw the Evo. Something real is happening out there and it has to do with me and you and—” He cut himself off before the pain could reach the surface. “I say, fuck it, let’s go get them. Let’s do  _ something _ .” 

Blue wanted to leave so badly, she ached for it. With sudden ferocity, she slammed the timer to the ground and stepped on it,  _ stomped _ on it, over and over and over until the tiny screen finally cracked, and a piece of plastic went spinning across the kitchen floor. Chainsaw made a noise at the commotion. “Let’s go to D.C.”

That lit a fuse within Ronan. 

“D.C.”

Blue stood up straight, solid, defiant. Maybe before the apocalypse, he would have seen her as a cute chihuahua attempting to fight off a Malamute. But there,  _ now _ , she was brimming with a grievous anger and rebelliousness that mirrored exactly what Ronan felt inside. She was a series of firecrackers on the verge of going off. Blue fucking Sargent understood. “Yeah. Let’s go find your brothers.”

“And Gansey?”

She hadn’t wanted to admit it out loud. She purposely didn’t mention Henry either. “And Gansey. My Camaro’s here, right?”

Electrified, Ronan nodded, his lips pursed in knowing smirk. He beckoned Blue to follow him out of the kitchen. 

“Oh, good, you’re alive,” said Calla as they entered the living room. She was by herself. “Mr. Gray said you were throwing up your guts. Are you feeling feverish? Nauseated? Think blood is going to come pouring out of your eyes?”

Ronan snarled. 

“Where’s Aunt Jimi and Mr. Gray? Gwenllian?” Blue asked, pointedly ignoring Calla’s comments. 

“Walking around the back, discussing weather probably. Gwenllian is tormenting or being tormented by that satyr child.” Calla narrowed her eyes. “You two are up to something. What are you up to?”

“We’re going for a walk around the Barns,” Blue lied with such swiftness Ronan thought Declan would be impressed as she grabbed her backpack. 

“With that?” Calla demanded, rising from the couch. 

“Yep.”

“ _ Blue _ .”

Blue whirled on her. “The rain is harmless! You said it yourself! We’re fine as long as we stay on the property!”

“That would be true if I believed you had any notion of staying on the property.”

“Is this house suddenly filled with parents? I’ll be  _ fine _ .”

Before Calla could say anything, Blue veered straight for the front door, Ronan on her heels. They were out of the door and down the porch and rain splattered their bare arms and faces. It was almost hard to believe there was evil afoot. A gentle mist could be seen over the hills. Birds flew overhead. The trees were as tall and protective as ever. Blue couldn't help but think of Artemus and hope that he was all right. The only sign of the changing world was the sky and its ominous rumbling and the fact that it hadn’t grown any darker or any lighter in the past few hours. It still hung as low as ever, oppressing, overbearing, smothering. Blue hated every ounce of it. 

She and Ronan jogged over to her Camaro, which she hadn’t seen in a couple weeks. She let her fingers graze over the paint, the metal cool and familiar against her skin. “Is this safe?” she asked. She knew the answer she expected to hear even though Gansey wasn’t around and her heart clenched. She knew the answer she hoped to hear otherwise and Ronan came to the rescue. 

“Safer than that cardboard box you all drive. Thing’s gonna fall apart at any second.” It was almost as bad as the Shitbox. 

Truth be told, Ronan had no idea if the Camaro would be safe. Dream objects were behaving differently than they’d ever had before. He was the Greywaren, whatever that meant. What was happening now had to do with ley lines, had to do with Lindenmere, had to do with dreaming. Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. He was the  _ Greywaren _ . Didn’t that mean he had a big fucking target painted on his back? But didn’t it also mean that he had a responsibility to  _ act _ ? Oh, how he wished he could ask Adam or even Gansey. He missed them so much, he sometimes found it hard to breathe. 

Blue slipped into the driver’s seat. She was still often anxious behind the wheel but the car welcomed her like an old friend. Strands of beads and crystals dangled from the rearview mirror along with a small toy cow that had been the subject of an inside joke between her, Henry, and Gansey during their road trip across the United States. Signs of them were littered all across the car. Ronan slung himself into the passenger seat and Blue fished around in her backpack. She withdrew her wallet and a small, translucent envelope that held her registration. She handed them to Ronan who opened the glove box and set them inside. He froze there for a second, his fingers just above a long, slender object. 

One of Gansey’s epipens. One of the ones Ronan had dreamed for him. 

Then he closed the glove box and sat back against the seat. 

Blue pulled away from the farmhouse. Calla was at the door, watching them leaving, yelling something after them, but Blue ignored her. Rebellion  _ thrilled _ her. 

She and Ronan drove down the driveway, the shapes of Jimi and Mr. Gray in the rearview mirror also disappeared as they had hurried to the front of the farmhouse after hearing the roar of the Camaro’s non-existent engine. They grimaced their way through Ronan’s dream security and then they were barreling into a filthy, rain-drenched environment. The world howled with rage and claws raked at the Camaro as shadows hungrily dashed after them. 

Thankfully, the Camaro was faster and the shadows were left in the dust. Ronan peered into the rearview mirror as the Barns property disappeared from view. Unhappy households were places for leaving. 

And so were pretty cages. 

_☣_

[Map (updated with each chapter)](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1dhfmY-bO7kFMfq4xjtWl19x--NvtlHFV&usp=sharing)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always:  
> Thanks to audikatia for all the edits and conversations that helped shape this chapter!  
> Thanks to Ben Lord for allowing me to steal him. 
> 
> Notes:  
> 1\. If the time stamps don't make sense, congrats: you're human!  
> 2\. If they do, you must be an elightened being with an advanced concept of time.  
> 3\. The map has been updated with 3 locations for this chapter: Cheng family mansion in the Hamptons + the two Lord properties next door.  
> 4\. If you see parallels between characters, it was likely intentional.  
> 5\. If you see symbolism, it was also likely intentional.  
> 6\. Where's Gansey? Wheresganseywheresganseywheresganseywheres--  
> 7\. When is the Pynch/Adansey/Rodansey stuff going to come in? Well, it's already been foreshadowed... it's coming! The devil's in the details for the time being. :D


End file.
